Albertsons’ appointment of billionaire Meg Whitman as executive chairman brings a seasoned business leader with substantial star power to the supermarket operator’s top ranks.
Whitman built her reputation in Silicon Valley, where she spent nearly two decades leading iconic companies including eBay and Hewlett-Packard through critical stages. That experience could prove pivotal for Albertsons as the grocer strives to sharpen its pitch with shoppers and strengthen its financial position.
At eBay, where she served as president and CEO from 1998 to 2008, Whitman oversaw the transformation of one of the nation’s most impactful technology companies from a startup into a juggernaut.
The online marketplace had only 30 employees when she arrived, but within eight years had a workforce of 13,000, the Stanford Graduate School of Business noted in 2006. Whitman also led eBay as its annual revenue went from $30 million to more than $8 billion, according to Albertsons.
To keep eBay focused during breakneck growth, she nurtured a culture that allowed people to make errors but pushed them to make corrections quickly, according to Stanford.
Throughout her career, Whitman focused on spotting success instead of looking for problems, the university said in a profile published in 2015.
“My advice, having done this a number of times, is to go into an organization and figure out what that company’s doing right, and do more of it,” she said, according to Stanford. “You’ll eventually get to your to-do list and to your fix-it list, but if you come in and just talk about what’s going wrong, you will lose hearts and minds.”
Whitman’s experience running HP, which she led from 2011 to 2018, could prove especially helpful as she puts down her imprint at Albertsons. When she joined HP, Whitman faced the challenge of dealing with the company’s personal computer and printer division at a time when it was under pressure, ultimately deciding to spin the division off into a new company, HP Inc. That decision helped strengthen the balance sheet of the enterprise technology company Whitman continued to head, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, The Wall Street Journal reported in 2017.
Whitman approached the problems HP was confronting by focusing on the company’s successes, she told Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business.
“[It] was completely obvious that the core of this company was innovation and engineering. So I immediately celebrated that. That was going to be our most important thing, increased R&D spending, and set the engineers free. That was the first core,” she said in a Q&A with Fuqua.
Whitman is one of the richest people in the U.S., with a net worth of about $4.2 billion, according to Forbes. She currently holds the No. 14 spot on the magazine’s list of the wealthiest self-made women in the U.S.
Whitman will receive a $100,000 base salary from Albertsons along with time-based restricted stock units worth $8.9 million.
