Leadership Lessons from Meg Whitman, CEO of Quibi, Former CEO of HP and eBay: Always Show Up Fully
Meg Whitman is without a doubt one of the most formidable leaders in the world today. She’s worth $4 billion, and is best known for taking eBay from $5.7 million to $8 billion in sales as eBay’s CEO from 1998 to 2008. She then became the CEO of Hewlett Packard, where she oversaw it split into HP Inc, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She remains on the boards of Procter & Gamble and Dropbox. In 2018, she became the CEO of Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s new short form video platform reinventing digital video and storytelling that closed a $1 billion dollars in startup funding.
Meg shares her most important lessons as a leader who has stepped into multiple high-pressure, high-profile roles. She discusses the importance of showing up fully in even the most difficult challenges, how to overcome rejection and loss, and how she built confidence and courage over the course of her career. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts
On Power & Picking Yourself Back Up
Lisa Carmen: How do you define power?
Meg Whitman: I would have to define power as good leadership. Tom Friedman wrote a very interesting article in The New York Times in his Op-Ed piece. It was titled, “The World Needs Great Leaders Now, and Here’s What It Looks Like.” Servant leadership, having a clear vision, bringing people along and sharing the truth with folks. Strong relationships are always built on truth. And so that’s what I think about when I think about great leadership, which I suppose to some degree leads to power.
Lisa Carmen: What was the moment in your life that you felt most powerless?
Meg Whitman: I think maybe two. The first was at my second job out of business school at Bain & Co. I remember my first boss saying to me, “You’re a terrible analyst”…. [#2] My first CEO job was at a company called FTD, which was a leveraged buyout by Perry Associates and Bain Capital, and I got fired from that job. Being fired is always a low point. But you just basically say you got to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and keep on going. It was good preparation for losing the Governor’s race because that was a very public loss.
On Confidence and Courage
Lisa Carmen: How do you step into these new roles with confidence, even if there is a little voice inside that’s doubting you?
Meg Whitman: It’s gotten easier as I have gotten older. It’s really scary when you’re in your 20s. But then you begin to have what I call pattern recognition. You’ve seen the similar problems before… And then, the other thing is, when I go into a company I always look for the good. When you come into a new situation, your instinct is ‘What are they doing wrong?’ It’s the wrong instinct. The best instinct is, ‘What are they doing right? Snd how do we do more of it?’
Lisa Carmen: I want to talk briefly about where your courage and optimism comes from. I know that when you went to business school, you were part of that beginning edge of women who were really starting to come into those professional degrees. So tell me about that experience, and how that or other parts of your life have given you the courage to do what you do today?
Meg Whitman: I think it really comes from my mom. My mom was an extraordinary person…. She didn’t have the experience, but long story short, four years later, she became a fully certified airplane mechanic and fully certified truck mechanic. And so she said to my sister, my brother and me, “If I can figure out how to be an airplane mechanic, you can do anything. Just give it your all and go in and have the confidence.” For some reason, we believed it.
On Good Things Arising From Loss
Lisa Carmen: When you lost the political race, what happened the day after? How were you feeling and how you jump back up again?
Meg Whitman: Well, it was very, very difficult. It’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to deal with was the race itself, and then the loss. And the next day is really devastating. Because you go from doing 8 or 10 events a day where everything is so busy, the next day you have literally nothing to do. And your friends don’t call you because they feel so badly for you….
In December, I was at home in the afternoon, and I was watching Ellen DeGeneres. Marc Andreessen called and said, “You know, we’re looking for board members for HP. We have a new CEO, a new strategy, and you’d be a perfect board member.”
On Advice for Rising Leaders
Lisa Carmen: What advice would you give to rising ambitious leaders?
Meg Whitman: I think you have to be open to possibilities…. The good news is when I came out of business school, we did think we were going to spend most of our career at one company. That is not the case anymore. You can hop around. You can go from one thing to another. Failure is no longer a black mark, particularly in Silicon Valley. If you’ve had a failure, if you’ve been associated with a company that didn’t work, actually, people think you’re more valuable because you’ve learned hard lessons.
On The Importance of Communication & Stories
Lisa Carmen: What is your unique superpower?
Meg Whitman: I think I am very good and experienced at laying out a vision for what we’re trying to accomplish, and then being able to lay out the strategy to get there. I think I’ve turned into quite a good communicator of business strategy over time. By the way I was helped by running for governor. I got to be a much better communicator running for governor. Because when you run in politics, it’s not about the facts and the figures. It’s about the stories that you tell.
On Being A Woman & Staying Authentic to Yourself
Lisa Carmen: What does it mean to you to be a woman?
Meg Whitman: The journey here has been: ‘How do I try to be the best wife, the best mother, now the best grandmother I can be?’ While also doing things I get a lot of joy from. I had to make trade-offs every time I couldn’t be the perfect wife, the perfect mother, the perfect hostess, the perfect dressed individual, I had to make trade-offs. And you know, no one can do it all in my view. No one can be perfect and so you just gravitate to the things that mean the most to you. I’ve always thought I have to be true myself, I can’t be someone I’m not.
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