Meg Whitman defends her time at HP - Women's Agenda

Meg Whitman defends her time at HP

Meg Whitman may have come in at No. 9 on Harvard Business Review’s recent list of the 100 best CEOs of all time, but it wasn’t a prize offered for her time at the struggling Hewlett Packard.

In a filmed interview with the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Network, she’s been asked why she couldn’t do for Hewlett Packard what she did for eBay – where she arrived to an office of 30 people and left it as a worldwide company of 15,000.

But when asked why the value of HP has dropped 50% since she arrived, Whitman managed a good humoured laugh with her response.

“We are making real progress. We have locked down on a strategy that I think is incredibly relevant to the changing nature of IT,” she said.

“My view is, I cannot change the past but I can change the future. I am all about forward looking at Hewlett Packard. We could spend a lot of time ‘would’ve, could’ve, should’ve’ wishing things hadn’t happened to this company. They have, so let’s go forward and build back our technology leadership and our products and services.”

Asked why HP made the disastrous $11 billion decision to purchase Autonomy, and whether she “just missed an 85% hole in the company” (before Whitman was CEO but while she was on the board), she moved to say the auditors gave the board unrealistic expectations, that HP still sees potential for Autonomy and that there’s no problems with corporate governance on the board.

Whitman was appointed HP chief executive in September 2011. She spent ten years as CEO of eBay before making the an unsuccessful bid for the Governor of California, spending $144 million of her own money in the process). She’s currently one of 21 female CEOs on the Fortune 500, and the only woman leading a company in the top 10.

She recently told BusinessWeek running for governorship was the hardest thing she’s ever done. “When things seem challenging here, I go back to that,” she said.

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