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 Meg
Whitman won't be caught telling a web-surfer why he needs another
pet rock. She won't be caught telling customers much at all, actually.
She prefers listening. And she runs a dotcom that's still rocking.
With a market cap, in fact, bigger than McDonald's. It's the auction
site eBay, which expects to make a cool $400 million this year on
revenues of $2 billion.
Whitman was brought in by eBay founder Pierre
Omidyar in 1998, when profits were just $7 million on revenues of
$90 million-to professionalise the growth trajectory. To 'manage'
it. And for years, the young dotcommers at eBay wondered if they'd
been had. This was, after all, a terrific idea to start with, a
self-exponential growth engine, its usefulness growing as a square
of its user base. A market for anything anybody would want to auction.
Was she practising any management at all? Employees shrugged. So
did customers.
Precisely the point. Whitman doesn't 'manage'
the way most old-world ceos do. Nor does she philosophise on management,
at least not in the traditionally preponderant manner. But she has
fans across cyberspace-across survivor-space, rather-who're keen
on the art of unobtrusive, cyber-age goal scoring.
It works. It works because Whitman's not dozing
on the job. If anybody is, it's the poor fools who think she is.
When a section of eBay regulars staged an insurgency against the
website's attempt to channelise its customers into its own online
payment mechanism, Whitman figured out what endeared them to their
preferred option-PayPal-and bought it. The alertness extends to
everything you get on eBay. More than anything else, she's cued
into the numbers. 'If it moves, measure it' is the mantra. It's
a core part of the subtle supervision programme (not her term, mind
you). So every little metric, down to the so-called 'noise levels'
on the site's discussion boards, shows up on her dashboard. For
quiet, dignified but devastatingly objective, analysis.
The noise-makers, of course, wouldn't have
a clue. They mustn't. And if it's pet rocks on auction, get the
song spoofster Weird Al Yankovic to start the buzz.
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