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A Business Leader Receive Credit For Raising Profit Margins Of An Organization

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Abstract
Meg Whitman built her legacy by helping eBay grow from 30 to13,000 employees during her tenure as the company’s CEO (Steen, 2006). Her tenure began in 1998 when the dot com era was about to take flight and as a transformational leader, she took eBay public six months after joining. The company was bringing in $4.7 million in revenue when she started and by the time she stepped down, revenue was at $7.7 billion. Meg Whitman has proven that in order to lead a successful web company, you need to be able to apply some “old” management styles while also adapting to the “new” web way. Today’s technology executives do not have to be computer geniuses, rather strong leaders who will embody the company culture they are trying to create or …show more content…

After these initial changes, six months later, eBay’s initial offering of $18 a share closed at $47 a share. Whitman is given credit for increasing eBay’s customer base from 750,000 members to more than seven million by 1999 (Anonymous, 2016). Whitman’s, strategic marketing and brand building of eBay were effective planning processes, in launching a successful IPO. During Whitman’s tenure, her decision making skills and her responsiveness to the task environment is a topic for discussion, ten years after her departure. On her first day at eBay, the website crashed for eight hours, halting all trading. Her quick decision making prompted the addition of backup software and an increase of computer servers to support the network traffic eBay was experiencing due to the high volumes of trading. The actions are standard reactions to the situation; it was her ability to manage the crisis on her first day that led her to successfully lead the senior managers to buy in that eBay’s number one job was to keep the site up. The website continued to experience power outages that lasted from 10-15 minutes during her first year which prompted her to develop a contingency plan. The plan consisted of her hiring Microsystems Inc. to manage eBay’s infrastructure while she worked on improving her internal technical environment (Holson, 1999). The infrastructure issues eBay was experiencing in the first few years

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