Peerless leader

"She represents both the emotional and rational side of the brand," says venture capitalist Bob Kagle, who helped recruit Whitman for eBay. "She is an active and fair listener, and tough-minded and competitive." Says Mary Meeker, a Morgan Stanley Internet analyst: "Meg personifies emotional intelligence, emotional IQ. She has worked with a significant number of people in her life. She has been in on a significant number of decisions and situations. She's processed a lot. It is the multitude of experiences that has shaped her and it cannot be underestimated." [Editor's note: The original version misstated Meeker's company affiliation and omitted several words in her quote.]

Just a few years ago, before Whitman's face appeared on the cover of every business magazine, you might have recognized her even though she bore no signature look save the efficient page-boy; a round, open face hosting a generous smile; and mirthful eyes that radiated a sense that she welcomes entertainment. You might have thought soccer mom/business exec - and been accurate.

Meg Whitman grew up the youngest of three children in an affluent family in Cold Spring Harbor, N.Y., on the northern coast of Long Island. Her father made a polite living loaning money to businesses that put up their accounts receivables as collateral. Her mother was, she says, a "stay-at-home mom." Both parents traced their lineage to Boston Brahmins. Whitman attended Cold Spring Harbor's highly rated public high school. She played field hockey, tennis, and basketball. She swam competitively and earned superb grades.

But it was near the end of her senior year that something surprising and seminal occurred. Her mother joined a women's delegation to China headed by actress Shirley MacLaine. It was one of the first such missions to visit after the nation reopened its doors to the West.

"When my mother came home after this great adventure, she told me what this experience taught her. She realized she could do anything she wanted and she wanted me to recognize that I could do the same," Whitman recalls. "It was a formative experience for both of us."

Whitman attended Princeton, intending to become a physician. "But organic chemistry got in the way," she recalls, smiling. She majored in economics, graduated in 1977, and enrolled at Harvard Business School that autumn. Her classmates included Elaine Chao, now US secretary of Labor; Gary Marshall, chairman and CEO of PepsiCo; Ronald Sargent, CEO of Staples; and John Thain, CEO of the New York Stock Exchange.

At Harvard she also met Griffith Harsh IV, who was finishing medical school. Three years later, after she earned her MBA and had worked on consumer branding at Procter & Gamble (with Steve Case, who would later run America Online) Whitman and Mr. Harsh married.

When Harsh, an aspiring brain surgeon, took his residency at the University of California at San Francisco, Whitman joined the San Francisco office of Bain & Company as a management consultant. She brought with her a P&G brand sensitivity, but it was her time in the field that forged what became her greatest strength - the ability to listen to customers and process their needs and desires into action.

For the next decade, as she was raising two children, Whitman moved upward in marketing positions, always advocating for customers as the driving forces for success. As a senior vice president for marketing consumer products at Disney, she helped open theme stores overseas, where she experienced language, social, and business-culture barriers that would again have to be reckoned with as eBay expanded its reach.

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