Hey, it's number one...
I think you're going to get a lot out of... whoops
I think you're going to get a lot out of...
I think you're getting.... Shoot, we're running out of steam. Here we go.
Welcome to today's 7 Super Tips.
I am your host Erik Qualman . A lot of you know me as Equalman. Super pumped to have Meg Whitman
on today's show. She's one of the top CEOs of this century.
Without further ado, here are 7 Super Tips from Meg Whitman.
So my encouragement to you is to be the men and women who stand up for free
speech, who welcome debate, who modeled for others what genuine dialogue is and
who are not afraid to have your beliefs challenged. Too many of us live in
intellectual silos where we seek out people and information that simply
reinforces our existing opinions. Venture out of those silos. We are better when we
are exposed to different ideas and competing philosophies. The one thing
that you have in your career is your reputation. What do you stand for?
Howard Schultz who is the founder and CEO of Starbucks sat on my board at eBay and we
had one very difficult decision that we had to make and I'll tell you that
decision. Back at eBay we were really run by largely a libertarian perspective.
If the item or the category of goods was legal for sale in the country in
which we were doing business then it was legal for sale on eBay. And Howard
Schultz came to one board meeting and he said, "You know Meg, I'm deeply concerned
that there is Nazi memorabilia for sale on eBay." So, it turns out that Nazi
memorabilia is perfectly legal for sale in the United States. It is not legal for
sale in Germany, it's not legal for sale in France, it's not legal for sale in many
countries, but in the United States it is legal for sale. And so Nazi
memorabilia was legal for sale on eBay. And he said, "Mick I just think this isn't
the right thing to do." And Pierre Jeff Skoll who was Pierre Omidyar co-founder
actually took the opposite point of view he said, "But it's
slippery slope. You know if you ban Nazi memorabilia then what's the next thing
that you have to ban? And what does that lead you into?" And Howard said I don't
know I know I can solve this problem and he looked at me and he said, "Meg what do
you want the character of the company to be?" And in the end we decided to ban Nazi
memorabilia. We decided to ban firearms, tobacco, alcohol. I mean we we then got
into a situation of making judgment calls about things that we wanted to ban
but the guiding principle is what's the character of the company and it was an
incredibly instructive lesson for the company and it set us on an entirely
different path in the end who you are what you stand for when the going gets
tough do you do the right thing and I would encourage you to do that because
while it may be inconvenient while you may lose your job while you may have to
leave the company you're working for in the end it is who you are and it is your
reputation and the only thing you take with you through your career is your
reputation and the people that you meet on the way up
are the same people you meet on the way down and so I think the other last bit
of advice in addition to character is you know what treat other people like
you would like to be treated and always extend that helping hand because it will
come back to you civility is more than nice manners it's a precondition of
democratic dialogue in the words of Professor Stephen L Carter of Yale Law
School civility is part of the quote etiquette of democracy unquote it allows
for genuine social interaction it's been said that the true genius of Martin
Luther King jr. was not his ability to argue the pain of an oppressed people
but his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their
dissent we should treat each other with civility not because we agree with
others but because it is a measure of our respect for human dignity it's what
we owe all people including those with whom we have fierce disagreements our
our institutions our culture our communities cannot be
sustained let alone thrive if civility is eroded in a tech company that means
you have to celebrate the engineers in an animation company you have to
celebrate the animators in a fashion design company you have to celebrate the
fashion designers and by the way they're all in many respects quite similar they
just happen to have a different domain of creativity the creatives at HB are
the engineers and so you have to recognize that celebrate that and then
you have to give the engineers or the fashion designers or the animes you have
to give them a bit of a sandbox in other words it's not good to say okay go do
whatever you want you've got to say hey listen here's the market that we're
going after here's the customer need here's what we think is going to be
happening in the environment and then you set them off and in almost any
industry it's actually magical what you get if you give them you know some
parameters not a box this big but enough to be really creative so probably most
of you know and you know this the changing culture at companies is the
most difficult thing that you do because cultures are very entrenched so my view
is we have to have what are the key things that we're gonna stand for and we
talked about that before innovators at heart corporate social responsibility
and will do anything for customers and then you have to say what are the things
that are getting in the way of us being a great company and for heel at Packard
one of the things getting in our way was sense of urgency and jumping on the
problems and I think it's because listen when customers have problems or there's
hard problems to be solved sometimes people back away from those challenges
you know who wants to go see a customer that's you know not particularly happy
with you but if you run to the fire I promise you these problems do not get
better with age it's not like fine wine you've got to run to the fire and so we
had a couple of things that we really focused on run to the fire was one
another was escalate the problems in 24 hours and resolve them in 48 and we gave
permission to escalate right to me and the culture was not a great thing to
escalate over your boss because your boss would not be happy that you had
told your boss's boss that there was a problem we had to completely change the
culture we if you did not escalate then that was
the problem and this is now washing nicely through hewlett-packard because
we didn't punish people for escalating we actually celebrated them I don't know
that I can be the perfect CEO the perfect wife the perfect mother the
perfect hostess and have my house look fabulous all the time I mean that's a
lot for one person and finally I sort of gave up the notion that I could be
perfect at all those things was a little bit like triage in an emergency room
what's the most important thing I said I'm gonna focus on the children my
husband and my job and everything else is gonna have to go you just have to
kind of figure out what's most important what you're good at what you can let go
of and I think that's the only way to manage all of this you know it's very
tempting when you join a new organization it doesn't have to be a
business you join a new not-for-profit or join the board of a company you tend
to your instinct is to look for what is going wrong and then be helpful in
trying to fix it I had quite the opposite idea eBay when I joined it was
growing at 70% compound monthly growth rate meaning every month the company was
70% bigger than the month before so my instinct instead of finding out what was
wrong I said what are we doing really well and can we do more of that and so I
really focused on what was going really well how do we do more of it and how do
we grow the organization which is very unusual when CEOs come into
organizations and I will say the 30 people that worked at eBay, I think felt
very in some ways validated that I wanted to see what was going right as
opposed to what was going wrong.
Well I hope you got a lot out of today's 7 Super Tips from Meg Whitman.
Remember this showis all around giving 7 Super Tips from some of the top thought leaders.
in the world and my hope is it helps you unlock and unleash your inner superpower.
Until next time this is Equalman reminding all of us
It's not what we take from the world, it's what we leave behind.