High profile CEOs as the topic - Essay Example

Professional and Personal Background Whitman has had a very diverse career history, serving as an executive at Walt Disney, Procter & Gamble, Hasbro, and DreamWorks. As the President and CEO of eBay, one of her more recent job roles, Whitman was directly involved with growing eBay into the powerhouse auction site it is today, taking the company from its roots of only 30 employees to a major corporation with revenues exceeding $8 billion annually. This experience eventually catapulted the CEO to take on the senior leadership role at Hewlett-Packard, a struggling computer and technology company maintaining its fair share of financial troubles.

This is her current role as a corporate executive at HP. Whitman’s personal life has been through its fair share of ups and downs, having received considerable negative publicity in 2010 when she failed to become the governor of California after spending $144 million of her own resources on the campaign. Whitman had caught national attention in this campaign having broken records for the most personal expenditures in history in any American election (York, 2010). This was obviously a humiliating moment for Meg Whitman.

However, the governance team at Hewlett-Packard was likely not fazed by this failure, as they maintained faith in her competencies by appointing her CEO of the company in January 2011. Whitman’s Management Style and Competency Meg Whitman would be defined as a charismatic and transformational leader. Transformational leaders are those that role model desired behaviors, establish a shared vision and mission, open effective lines of communications in a decentralized structure, and also serving as a coach and mentor to employees and managers (Fairholm, 2009).

As the new CEO of Hewlett-Packard, Whitman illustrates these transformational qualities with a recent set of policies involving executives and their role in the company. Whitman demanded that executives abandon their posh offices at HP and, instead, take their job roles into regular cubicles in order to facilitate better communications with lower-level employees (Thomas White, 2012). Whitman seemed to realize the importance of maintaining more visibility in order to build a culture of cohesion and dedication that is important to turnaround a company that needs more innovation and talent management.

Hard Management Practices leading to Whitman’s Effectiveness Furthermore, Whitman’s understanding of the real-world economic environment gives her advantages as a quality leader. At Hewlett-Packard, it was desired by some executives to begin acquiring other companies as a means of turning around the struggling company. However, Whitman used her long-term thinking which is important for managers in terms of planning prowess to recognize that such an activity would only further threaten the cash-strapped company and impose more debt.

Instead, Whitman established the systems necessary to invest more heavily in research and development as a means of improving HP’s market position. Offered Whitman, “Let’s optimize what we have before we go off and do something else” (Worthen, 2012, p.2). This is what makes Whitman such a strong manager and leader: she is able to effectively scan the external market and compare it to the current