Peerless leader

A year later, in an incident that would become the reason Whitman includes a hard hat among her decorations, she and eBay hit their nadir. Shortly before 7 p.m. on Thursday, June 10, 1999, eBay's site went down - and stayed down. Millions of eBayers around the globe saw their dealings suspended, including companies in that community for whom eBay handles the bulk of their distribution. The site had crashed before, but each time, the engineering team had been able to resuscitate it. But this had all the signs of a meltdown.

Whitman had been monitoring the situation from home before driving to eBay's headquarters at 4 a.m. "I did the only thing I knew how to do - be there." Being there, among the bewildered engineers and IT vendors would prove to be a defining moment in her career. Cots were set up in the conference room. Tables were loaded with soap, towels, deodorant, shaving cream, shampoos, and conditioner. The war room atmosphere at eBay had the look of a long night that nobody knew how to end.

"If I was there, then the best people from the vendors would be there," Whitman says. "I could call Scott McNealy at Sun, which ran our servers, or Ray Lane at Oracle, or Mark Leslie at Veritas and say: 'I really need you.' " Whitman also saw this as the right moment to leap out of her comfort zone. "I'd go to meetings and hear about technology-platform architectures, things I didn't understand. Obviously, it was time I learned."

She doesn't shy away from holding others to that same level of accountability. "She's the most down-to-earth executive I've ever worked for," says an executive who interacts with Whitman almost daily. "But when she asks, you'd better have your answers, your numbers, and your recommendations ready."

The site came up, but crashed again, throughout the weekend. When the site would allow, the eBayers at headquarters could log in and hear from the community of customers, people who might be just one click away from defecting. But the preponderance of feedback was not a howl of indignation, but sympathy and offers of help. Ebay's center, its community, had held. But for how long?

"On Monday, the site came up but was not working," Whitman recalls. "Pierre arrived and came into the operations room. One look at us and he could tell what we'd been through nonstop over the weekend. I went up to him and said: 'What if they can't fix this?' " Whitman recalls. "Pierre, who is the calmest individual in the world, said: 'Usually, when it gets this bad, they're just a couple of hours from figuring it out.' "

Whitman was not completely reassured. But she held out hope. "Sure enough, two hours later, a 24-year-old Oracle tech adviser came running in and said: 'I've got it! I've got it!' " Whitman says, still sounding emotional nearly five years later. "We've come a long way from 1999," she adds quickly. "Technology was our Achilles' heel, and now it is our core competence."

But the transition wasn't as smooth as she makes it sound. In the four months following the site blowup, heads rolled at eBay. New technology protocols were put in place. "I learned more about technology than I could have learned in 10 years," Whitman says. "It was total immersion." Her handling of the crisis also honed some of Whitman's own core competencies.

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