Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2017, when Whitman was CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise. She stepped down in 2018, later ran Quibi and served as US ambassador to Kenya (2022-2024). The Uber CEO rumour was already outdated: Uber named Dara Khosrowshahi in late August 2017.
In 1998, Meg Whitman took the helm at eBay as the company’s CEO. At the time, eBay was a young company only three years old, with just 30 employees and revenue of 5 million dollars. When she left ten years later, eBay had 15,000 employees and 8 billion dollars in sales from 30 countries, according to CNBC.
But just a year after taking charge of eBay, in 1999, Meg Whitman made what she calls the worst mistake of her career as CEO, one that cost her the huge Japanese internet market.
In an interview with CNBC, Whitman explained that she watched eBay’s users and traffic grow dramatically. That disproportionate growth brought down eBay, which back then had an unstable, poorly prepared website, and the company had to scramble for a quick fix to get the site running smoothly for users again.
And worst of all, because of that mistake they lost the Japanese market, eBay’s second most important market.
Whitman says that before this happened she suspected eBay needed an overhaul to handle the flood of new users. She had a feeling, she said, that the technology underpinning eBay wasn’t going to help them scale to where they needed to be, and she considers the failure of eBay Japan the biggest failure of her time at eBay.
It taught her that you have to follow your intuition, Whitman said in an interview. Yet despite that big mistake, Whitman took the company to the next level, managed to come through the dot-com crash and reinvented the company at every level, until it became what is today probably the largest auction and person-to-person selling company.
Whitman has been the only woman to lead two major American technology corporations: after leaving eBay, she became CEO of Hewlett-Packard (HP), where she managed to adapt that old company to the fast-changing modern world of PCs, smartphones and tablets.
(See: 9 books that shaped the thinking of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos)
Meg Whitman’s second failure
A second failure worth mentioning, according to Whitman, was her 2010 campaign for governor of California against Democrat Jerry Brown.
She says she spent 144 million dollars of her own money on the election campaign, and lost. From that defeat she learned a new communication skill which, according to her, opened the doors to working at HP for an astronomical salary.
She learned that what matters isn’t figures or facts, but the stories you tell to communicate the vision you’re trying to achieve in the organisation.
She put everything she had into the campaign and it didn’t work out the way she had hoped, Whitman concludes, but she learned a great deal from it, and she believes it made her a stronger executive and a stronger person.
As the saying goes, failure is something that can happen to any of us. But the attitude you take once you’ve run into failure is what will define you as a person and as a professional.
And as we can see, when someone is candid and honest with themselves and publicly acknowledges their mistake, other companies appreciate it. In fact, Uber is reportedly negotiating right now to “sign” Whitman as the company’s CEO, or has at least shown interest in her.
See also: 11 brilliant pieces of advice entrepreneurs received from their mentors
Featured image: Erik (HASH) Hersman from Orlando, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
