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VOLUME 10
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Happy New Year. The economy is strong. The mood is generally good out there on the street. We're looking forward to a crack-a-lacking 2006!!! More than ever, however, leadership is a crucial issue for every corporation. More than ever, The Mark of a Leader is a great tool that is getting people focused and working at higher levels. We have new stories in the works, including interviews with leaders in business and the community. Our back end products are being expanded. The word is spreading. We're ready to rock in 2006 and hope every one of you is too! Let's get on with it! Yours in leadership
P.S. If you want to be part of our Video iPod Referral Program, please email me at dougk@themarkofaleader.com. Please visit our website at www.themarkofaleader.com |
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FEATURE
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QUOTABLE QUOTES "You can kill a man but you can't kill an idea." Meg Whitman "You can easily judge the character of others by how they treat those who can do nothing for them or to them." Malcolm Forbes |
MEG WHITMAN - WORLD'S #1 AUCTIONEER
So you want to buy a piece of waterfront property in Panama? Who you gonna call? Not only is eBay the world's largest online real estate marketplace, it is the world's largest "just about anything" marketplace today. Founded in 1995 by Pierre Omidyar when his then girlfriend wanted a better way to trade her growing collection of Pez dispensers, eBay was a fringe auction site for people looking to buy and sell personal goods and oddities. That was until it brought in Meg Whitman as CEO in 1998. Armed with an MBA from Harvard and Bachelor of Economics from Princeton, Meg was certainly not your typical ecommerce executive at the time. First, she was female. Next she was east coast Ivy League - a long way from The Valley. Third, she was a marketer not a geek - P&G, Disney, Keds, and FTD being among the brands whose success she had helped drive. Did the board make the right choice bringing a woman who had driven sales of Mr. Potato Head into this promising online marketplace? You betcha. When Whitman took over in March 1998, revenues were just over $6 million. She took it public with a hugely successful IPO shortly after her arrival. Today eBay boasts sales of over $4 billion, and has local marketplaces around the world. Perhaps more important, the power of the eBay brand today holds the same dominance in the buy-sell world as Kleenex does in facial tissues. |
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DID YOU KNOW? Al Capone's business card said he was a used furniture dealer. You are more likely to be killed by a champagne cork than by a poisonous spider. The microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. |
She has worked to expand the brand as well, acquiring iBazaar, PayPal, Skype, Kijiji, Rent.com and Shopping.com. Clearly eBay sees a future where it can provide significantly more to its loyal customers than the buying and selling of hard goods. So what has been the secret of Ivy League Meg as she has taken this tiny online auction site to global dominance? Number one, she understands the power and importance of brand. One of her first moves was to take the company more corporate, recruiting from marketers like Pepsi to surround herself with brand experts. Their efforts helped take eBay out of the bottom-feeding world of garage sales and into selling new goods for the world's largest manufacturers as well. Number two, she has an inclusive management style. The consistent word on her is that she is "grounded", staying cool in one of the most volatile businesses in the world. Number three, she understands customer loyalty. From day one it was clear to her where the secret of eBay's success would lie: "What is interesting about eBay is that we provide the marketplace but it is the users who build the company. They bring the product to the site, they merchandise the product and they distribute it once sold." Every great brand in history has, at its core, a deep understanding and passion for its customers. But few online brands have found a way to make a customer focus come to life the way eBay has. They see themselves as a community not a store. They have put in place security and protection measures to make buying and selling a safe, secure process, even when the seller is on the other side of the world. They have done this while providing a forum for trading everything from hand-me-downs to islands. |
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QUOTABLE QUOTES "In the long run the pessimist may be proved right, but the optimist has a better time on the trip." Daniel L. Reardon "Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere." Albert Einstein |
A passion for customers, starting with Whitman, runs through the entire company. Kaizen is a way of life at eBay, listening to its customers about everything it does and improving on the smallest detail. Its message boards get hit with about 100,000 messages every week with suggestions from users on how to improve. eBay listens and acts. Meg also initiated a "Voice of the Customer" program where, several times a year, 12 loyal customers are flown in from across the country to eBay's head office to act as a focus group for Meg and her team. They want to know firsthand what's working and what's not. She also implemented a pricey system that responds to customer emails within 24 hours. Thanks to this kind of attitude, most of eBay's customers come from referrals. Listening has many benefits. "At Hasbro, we used to spend a lot of time trying to pick the next hot toy - the next Cabbage Patch Kid or the next Pokemon. At eBay, we don't worry about that. Our army of users figures out what's hot before we even know," she says. The story is not without its hiccups, of course. The most public of these was a server outage which lasted over 20 hours and shut down business several years ago. eBay's response was to personally call and email thousands of customers and refund millions in fees. That's how you build and keep customer loyalty, whether your business is on the Ginza or the Internet. And perhaps that deep understanding is at the heart of the Mark of Meg Whitman. Deep down she understands that all business is about customers, whether you're selling Beanie Babies or Sun servers. The role of the merchant is to provide the best array of goods to the widest possible range of customers, simply, securely, and with complete integrity. At the top of the heap in the world of the Internet, it is often difficult to differentiate the superegos of the leaders from their brands. Meg Whitman doesn't seem to need to be in the press every day. Her mission is not self-aggrandizement. It is about building a great brand with fiercely loyal customers. And so far it is paying off in spades. eBay is showing us all the way commerce should be done today, and will be done in the future. |
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Please visit us at www.themarkofaleader.com. Copyright 2006 Mark of a Leader |
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