Meg Whitman

President and Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as the Chairwoman of HP Inc.

Net worth: US$2.1 billion (June 2015)

Margaret Cushing "Meg" Whitman (born August 4, 1956) is an American business executive and political activist and donor. Whitman is currently the President and Chief Executive Officer of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as the Chairwoman of HP Inc.

A native of Cold Spring Harbor, New York, Whitman is a graduate of Princeton University, New Jersey, and Harvard Business School, Massachusetts. Whitman served as an executive in The Walt Disney Company, where she was Vice President of Strategic Planning throughout the 1980s. In the 1990s, Whitman served as an executive for DreamWorks, Procter & Gamble, and Hasbro.

Whitman served as President and Chief Executive Officer of eBay, from 1998 to 2008. During Whitman's 10 years with the company, she oversaw its expansion from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue, to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. In 2014, Whitman was named 20th in Forbes List of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World.

Early work

Beginning her career in 1979 as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. Whitman later moved on to work as a consultant at Bain & Company's San Francisco office. She then rose through the ranks to achieve the position of senior vice president.

Whitman became vice president of strategic planning at The Walt Disney Company in 1989. Two years later she joined the Stride Rite Corporation, before becoming president and CEO of Florists' Transworld Delivery in 1995.

As Hasbro's Playskool Division General Manager, she oversaw global management and marketing of two children's brands, Playskool and Mr. Potato Head starting in January 1997. She also imported the UK's children's television show Teletubbies into the U.S.

eBay

Whitman joined eBay on March 1998, when it had 30 employees and revenues of approximately $4 million. During her time as CEO, the company grew to approximately 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue by 2008. Originally, when Whitman had joined eBay, she found the website as a simple black and white webpage with courier font. On her first day, the site crashed for eight hours. She believed the site to be confusing and began by building a new executive team. Whitman organized the company by splitting it into twenty-three business categories. She then assigned executives to each, including some 35,000 subcategories. In 2004, Whitman made several key changes in her management team. Jeff Jordon took over PayPal, Matt Bannick took control of international operations and Bill Cobb was placed in control of U.S. operations, which has the colorful U.S. logo, while each international site has unique branding.

Hewlett-Packard

In January 2011, Whitman joined Hewlett-Packard's board of directors. She was named CEO on September 22, 2011. As well as renewing focus on HP’s Research & Development division, Whitman’s major decision during her first year as CEO has been to retain and recommit the firm to the PC business that her predecessor announced he was considering discarding.

In May 2013, Bloomberg L.P. named Whitman "Most Underachieving CEO" along with Apple's CEO Tim Cook (ranked 12) and IBM's Virginia Rometty (ranked 10) -- whose stocks have all turned in the worst numbers relative to the broader market since the beginning of each CEO's tenure. HP's stock led the list by underperforming by 30 percentage points since Whitman took the job.

AWARDS

• On more than one occasion, she was named among the top five most powerful women by Fortune magazine.
• Harvard Business Review named her the eighth-best-performing CEO of the past decade
• Financial Times named her as one of the 50 faces that shaped the decade.