Ambassador Meg Whitman
UncategorizedThe Brand champion for Kenya PLC
In December 2021, Margaret Cushing Whitman was nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as the United States Ambassador to Kenya. She was confirmed in July 2022 and took office the following month. She would later tell the American Chamber of Commerce in Nairobi that since she arrived in Kenya, she had been ‘laser focused on strengthening the U.S.-Kenya trade and investment relationship in coordination with the Kenyan government.’
She developed an investment promotional pitch worthy of a Fortune 100 icon titled ‘Why Africa, Why Kenya’, aimed at promoting Kenya as a great place to do business. This debuted at an American Chamber of Commerce gathering in March 2023, earning her the sobriquet, ‘Kenya’s Chief Investment Officer’ and ‘Kenya’s Ambassador to the USA.’ She told the Chamber that her confidence in Kenya was not isolated as Bloomberg, a world leader in business reporting, touted Kenya as the Singapore of Africa in June 2023. She then travelled around Kenya and the United States, talking about how investments in Kenya ‘ultimately increase prosperity for citizens in both countries’
Whitman’s ‘Why Africa, Why Kenya’ lacked the first critical ‘Why’ on whose credibility the other two ‘Why’s’ would depend. And that was ‘Why Meg Whitman?’ Why should the world accept what she says about Kenya? She may have felt that that answer was obvious. Still, when she was appointed, very few Kenyans had heard about her, a situation similar to that of one of her predecessor, Ambassador Michael Ranneberger. I recall asking him who he was during a reception for then-Senator Barack Obama at the Serena Hotel in Nairobi. He told me he was the new American ambassador, but no one knew him! So ‘Why Margaret Cushing Whitman’ and the related question of ‘Why eBay’‘, the company that is synonymous with her achievements, is a good place to start.
Why Margaret Cushing Whitman
In his statement to the Senate backing Whitman’s nomination, Senator Mitt Romney, the former Republican presidential candidate, emphasised the need to appoint ‘our best and brightest to represent America’s ideals and interests’. Romney perfectly encapsulated Whitman’s academic and professional accomplishments, and he was not the first to recognise her significance. In contrast to some senators who have little familiarity with the candidates they endorse, Mitt Romney’s support for Whitman was genuine. He had been a partner at Bain Consulting, where he hired Whitman in 1980 and managed her for the subsequent eight years. By the time her nomination reached the Senate, he had known her for twenty-five years.
Whitman later served as eBay’s president and chief executive officer (CEO) from 1998 to 2008. Legendary entrepreneurs like Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, and Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, served on her initial board at eBay.
As CEO of eBay, she acquired PayPal, a global leader in online payment solutions, as well as Skype, which had 100 million users at the time of purchase and would grow to over half a billion by the end of eBay’s third quarter in 2009, in addition to Butterfield & Butterfield, one of the world’s top three land-based auction houses.
Afterwards, she became president and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise from 2011 to 2015, during the company’s major split. HP is recognized as the symbolic founder of Silicon Valley, and in 1968, it produced the world’s first personal computer, the Hewlett-Packard 9100A; the world’s first handheld scientific electronic calculator in 1972 and both inkjet and laser printers for desktops in 1984; amongst many other iconic IT products. In 2007, HP became the largest IT company in the world and the world’s leading PC manufacturer from 2007 until the second quarter of 2013
Whitman is the only woman in the world to have been president and CEO of three multinational Fortune 100 companies – eBay, HP, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. At the time of her nomination, she was also a trustee of The Nature Conservancy, one of the world’s largest land and water conservation organizations and national chair of Teach for America.
She has also been a board director of some of the world’s biggest financial, manufacturing and consumer goods companies. She was a director of GM, the world’s largest automaker, for 77 years until 2008 and the largest automaker in the United States in 2022. Procter & Gamble (P&G) is one of the world’s most influential consumer goods companies with iconic, game-changing brands like Pampers diapers, Tide laundry detergent, and Crest toothpaste. It is estimated that PG brands are used three billion times a day. Goldman Sachs, the second-largest investment bank globally, measured by revenue. In 2022, it managed over $2.5 trillion in assets, close to the IMF’s estimated GDP of $3 trillion in 2023 for the entire African continent. In his book The Partnership: The Making of Goldman Sachs, Charles D. Ellis describes Goldman Sachs as a partnership of such strengths that ‘it operates with almost no external constraints in virtually any financial market it chooses, on the terms it chooses, on the scale it chooses, when it chooses, and with the partners it chooses.‘
Whitman has also been highly acclaimed by some of America’s and, indeed, the world’s most prominent business leaders. In their review of her biography The Power of Many: Values for Success in Business and in Life. A.G. Lafley, chairman of Procter & Gamble, wrote, ‘in many years of working with Meg, I have seen her lead game-changing innovation, make tough decisions and passionately commit herself to important causes – all based on strong, transparent values.’ Howard Schultz, the legendary chairman and CEO of Starbucks, wrote that as ‘an eBay board member, I saw firsthand Meg Whitman’s determination to live and manage by the answer to the question ‘What is the right thing to do?’ as she helped eBay develop its character as a company’ While Jeffrey Immelt, chairman and CEO, General Electric described her as ‘an excellent business leader and an even better person’ And Mary Meeker, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley said “Meg attacks problems. Meg knows how to make tough decisions, how to cut through complexity and uncertainty…and find solutions to challenges.’
In 2004 and 2005, Fortune ranked her as the most powerful woman in business, and in 2014, Forbes ranked her 20th on the list of the 100 Most Powerful Women in the World. Time acknowledged that she was among the world’s most influential people and was a fixture on Business Week’s list of top managers year after year. Harvard Business Review named her in 2010 as the eighth best-performing CEO of the past decade, and the Financial Times in 2009 named her as one of the 50 faces that shaped the decade. She was inducted into the US Business Hall of Fame in 2008, and The New York Times cited her in the same year as among the women most likely to become the first female president of the United States. Whitman has also been inducted into the Bay Area Business Hall of Fame and was the National Board chairperson at Teach for America.
Apart from her corporate distinctions, Whitman comes from a highly accomplished professional and academic family on both sides of her vows. Whitman herself is an all-around Ivy League undergraduate and graduate scholar. She holds a Bachelor of Arts/Science Degree from Princeton University and a Master of Business Administration from Harvard University. Her husband, Professor Griffith Rutherford Harsh IV, is a highly acclaimed board-certified neurosurgeon who was a professor in the Department of Neurosurgery at the University of California Davis Medical Center before leaving for Kenya with Whitman. In Kenya, he maintained his academic appointment at UC Davis while holding visiting professorships at the University of Nairobi and Kenyatta University.
He has also been President of the American Academy of Neurological Surgery and the Neurosurgical Society of America, Chairman of the Neurosurgery Research and Education Foundation of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons, and Vice President of the Society of Neurological Surgeons. Harsh has also served at the cutting edge of medical research and education worldwide through his membership on the Board of Fellows of Harvard Medical School and the Advisory Council on Education of Harvard Medical School.
Her father-in-law, Professor Griffith R. Harsh III, was formerly the Chair of the Division of Neurological Surgery at the University of Alabama in Birmingham and served as Chairman of the American Board of Neurological Surgery. While her brother-in-law is also a neurosurgeon, Anne’s eldest sister, her only sibling, graduated from the University of Pennsylvania before attending Harvard, where she completed a PhD in archaeology and anthropology, along with an MBA from Boston University. Subsequently, she joined the faculty at Harvard Business School.
It is arguably true that no woman or man of her corporate distinction and acclaim has flown the ambassador’s flag in any African country since the inception of ambassadors two centuries ago, and very few, if any, in other regions of the world.
Why eBay
The story of eBay and that of its most famous CEO, Meg Whitman, is a story of one of the greatest internet entrepreneurial ventures of the 20th and 21st centuries. Adam Cohen, who was previously the chief technology writer at Time magazine and was on the editorial board of The New York Times when he wrote The Perfect Store: Inside eBay, described eBay as ‘easily the most interesting story of the early Internet age, and one of the most important business stories of our time’ He added that its a tale of what can happen in business when the stars align.
While Joseph Nocera, the executive editor of Fortune magazine, in his review of The Perfect Store: The Rise (and Rise) of eBay for the New York Times, described eBay as ‘one of those unstoppable business phenomena, like McDonald’s in the 1970s or Walmart in the 80’s’ Eric Nee, Senior Writer, Fortune described it as ‘one of the decade’s greatest business success stories’ while David Siegel, author, Futurize Your Enterprise described it as ‘one of the most daring, fanatically innovative, customer-centric companies on the planet’ And David Bunnel, author of The eBay Phenomenon, and one of the most authoritative analysts of the computer industry as the founder of PC Magazine, PC World, and Macworld, described eBays online auction as ‘one of the greatest uses of Internet technology.’
The great eBay legend had an inauspicious beginning as a sole proprietorship ‘headquartered’ in an extra bedroom in the small apartment of a 28-year-old Iranian American migrant called Pierre Omidyar. Without an advertising budget, Wall Street consultants, public – relations advisers, or deals with other sites to drive traffic, Omidyar launched an internet auction site on Labour Day 1995 that was meant to test whether people would be interested in buying and selling from and to strangers in an auction on the internet. To generate a ‘proof of concept, ‘he decided to list his spoilt laser pointer, which was headed for his dustbin and was virtually worthless.
The site started with one listing of one item, one bid of one dollar, and no other listings for the next two weeks, finally attracting a bid of $14 the following week. The firm would operate for about a year with no employees other than the founders before recruiting Mary Lou Song, a twenty-seven-year-old Korean American, about a year later on October 28, 1996. She found that the only furniture the two founders had were two particleboard desks, a folding table and beach chairs. Song was offered a card table for a desk and a matching folding chair. The ‘office’, if one can call it that, had only one phone line with an unpublished number, which employees were banned from answering when it rang. But the worst was yet to come. When Song decided to examine the website’s ‘dingy gravy background and dull typeface,’ it resembled “an old dirty newspaper.”
You would have needed to be a biblical seer to believe that this company and its site, which started with a single listing of one item and one bid of one dollar and no other listings for the next two weeks, finally attracted over the next week another bid of three dollars, then four dollars and finally the grand bid of fourteen dollars would within four years grow registered users to 10 million, attract on an average day 1.8 million unique visitors, list five items for sale every second as compared to the one item that had initially been listed for two weeks for sale and generate $113 of gross merchandise sales every second as compared to the grand $14 that the initial auction had managed to create after two weeks, four years earlier.
At this time, eBay would also list more than 2 million items for sale at any one time and was holding 1 million plus auctions daily, climbing to become the world’s largest market for person-to-person online trading and worth more than Yahoo! and Amazon combined after the spring of 2000.
When Whitman took the company public on September 24, 1998, the public’s response was extraordinary and unprecedented. During the first day, share prices rose from $18 to close at $48, finally reaching $234 within six months. Benchmark Capital, one of the Valley’s leading VC firms, whose partner had initially dubbed eBay a “this sort of online flea market type of thing”, would achieve a 49,000 per cent return on its $5 million investment. This return ‘trumped all previous venture capital returns in the industry’s collective memory, including those of Microsoft, Cisco, Sun, and other big successes.’
On Friday, September 15, 1999, eBay celebrated its second anniversary as a public company. It now had 1,500 employees and hosted $ 5 billion in auctions annually. To put the extraordinary achievements of eBay into perspective, one has to note that it took Cisco Systems twelve years and 10,000 employees, Microsoft nineteen years and 16,000 employees, and Intel twenty – three years and 25,000 employees to generate the same level of economic activity as eBay over six years.
Today, e Bay has 133 million active buyers worldwide, 2.1 billion listings and $12 billion in mobile volumes. As of 2023, it was the second most visited online marketplace with a market capitalization of 24 billion US dollars, making it one of the consumer internet and online services companies with the largest market capitalization globally.
Why Africa? Why Kenya?
In her address at the 8th Devolution Conference in Eldoret, Whitman on ‘Why Africa, Why Kenya?’ Whitman wowed the delegates, who included the president, vice president, cabinet secretaries and all the governors of Kenya’s 47 devolved governments, with her crisp, impassioned, persuasive, energetic, dramatic and well-researched presentation. It was a veritable prospectus for Kenya PLC pitched by a highly distinguished and celebrated ex-Fortune 100 CEO turned diplomat. It doesn’t get better than that.
US Ambassador Meg talks about Kenya’s business environment at the Devolution Conference in Eldoret.
Many delegates were shocked to learn about the country’s economic potential, which they were not even aware of, and the calibre of investors who were already engaged in exploiting it. It was like Whitman pitching Kenya to them rather than vice versa. She took it upon herself to provide extremely high-quality consultancy for the Kenya government pro bono. At the end of her speech, President Ruto led the delegates in giving the ambassador a standing ovation.
Her full speech can be watched here, but some of the key aspects were as follows:
Kenya in Africa
She told her audience that Kenya is one of Africa’s leading foreign direct investment and venture capital destinations. Kenya receives significantly more venture capital than anywhere else on the continent, generating roughly triple the venture capital to GDP ratios of Nigeria, Egypt, and South Africa. And that in 2022, Kenyan women-founded startups raised more in equity, again more than any other country on the continent.
Kenya in East Africa
ICT in Kenya.
She said Kenya is the leading regional ICT hubknown as the Silicon Savannah, and it is set to become the premier destination for tech sector investment and innovation in Africa. It was the first country on the continent to have a successful homegrown technology company, MPesa, the largest mobile money network in the world, that processes 360 billion dollars worth of payments in 11 African countries. Kenya also generates over 90% of its energy from renewable sources, a critical resource for ICT.
Kenya and the USA
Whitman pointed out that the US is Kenya’s largest export market and used a ‘proof of concept’ approach to showcase the vast number of US and other companies that have invested in Kenya and that trade with Kenya. Two of the significant companies she mentioned were Nextgen and Revital Healthcare.
Nextgen.
Nexgen, Kenya is Africa’s most sophisticated labelling technology edge-certified factory. It is also the African headquarters of the US-based global provider of apparel brand identification and packaging products. It produces state-of-the-art care labels, heat transfers, variable data products (including RFID tags and stickers), brand identification products, woven labels and other packaging offerings.
During its opening, which Ambassador Whitman attended, Manuel Torres, Managing Director for NexGen’s EMEA operations, said, “We could not be more excited about the opportunity to establish our African headquarters in Kenya.’ And that this ‘investment in Kenya is a perfect example of how we align our investments with the strategic needs of our customers.” While Jim Welch, chief executive officer of Nexgen Packaging. said, ‘With the growing demand for apparel, footwear and home products made in Africa, Nexgen is excited to be leading the industry with the launch of this state-of-the-art, sustainable facility. Nextgen has other headquarters in Hong Kong, Chicago, and Madrid.
Kenya’s Revital Healthcare is the largest manufacturer of medical products in Africa, with a manufacturing capacity of 2.1 billion medical devices per year. It produces 48 devices and exports to 28 countries.
It has so far manufactured over one billion devices. It is also Africa’s largest Rapid Test Kit Production facility and the first African USFDA-certified and patented auto-disable syringes manufacturer. Launched by Ambassador Meg Whitman in May 2024, it can produce 20 million test kits a month for HIV, malaria, HCG, hepatitis dengue, and syphilis, among others.
These kits have a market of over a billion across the continent. With the support of USAID, the manufacturing plant can produce 240 million tests per year. At the launch, Whitman described it as ‘rewriting the script on what’s possible when it comes to expanding access to quality healthcare in Africa.”
Conclusion
She concluded her 2023 address by saying, ‘If your business is already in Kenya, you are ahead of the curve. I hope you consider increasing your investment, partnership, and plans for expansion. If you are not, as is said in Swahili, Karibu Kenya – Welcome to Kenya!’ And in 2024, she told the American Chamber of Commerce that the ‘economic relationship between Kenya and the US has been ‘impressive and inspiring’, that this is ‘the moment to take a risk, to consider investing’, that this is ”the moment to diversity your supply chains and achieve your green energy goals’ that this is ‘the moment to capitalize on our 60-year partnership and invest, build, and grow our economies’. And that investing in Africa, specifically Kenya, ‘offers an opportunity to do good while growing your business.’
She also put on her former Fortune 500 CEO’s hat in 2024 and told the audience, ‘I have been in your shoes’ and ‘I know what it is like to make business decisions.’ She encouraged them to take calculated risks because she believes ‘innovation and growth come from stepping outside your comfort zone.’ She advised that the risk is worth taking and that she can hear ‘opportunity knocking.’ Leading her to ask the audience: Will you answer the door?
It is therefore not surprising that she was nicknamed ‘Kenya’s Chief Investment Officer’ and ‘Kenya’s Ambassador to the United States’. And on this website: the brand champion for Kenya PLC.
U.S.-Kenya Business Roadshow
Whitman did not stop her campaign at the doors of existing American investors in Kenya but decided to take the fight back home. During her US investment pitching roadshow, she told a room full of potential investors in San Franciso that “Kenya is the gateway to the East Africa market of almost 500 million consumers. Kenya is the regional logistic and financial hub. And Kenya, ‘with its Silicon Savannah and super smart engineers, is the region’s ICT hub.’
Sam Gichuru, the founder and CEO of Kidato Inc., who was part of the Kenyan delegation on the roadshow, was so amazed with Whitman’s mastery of the Kenyan investment landscape and potential and ability to pitch it that he told the Standard newspaper that the US Ambassador, who was ‘in fine form’, “pitched Kenya the way startups pitch to investors” And that “Listening to top global executives discuss the opportunities in Kenya, with supporting data, it is evident that as Kenyans, we are blind and deaf to the gold mine that is our home. I’m even surprised; I just realized I don’t know my country well enough,” he added.
President Ruto acknowledged Whitman’s leadership role as a ‘force multiplier’ by helping the Kenyan government understand its potential and pitch effectively. He said, “I have learnt something fantastic from Ambassador Whitman (that) Kenya has innumerable marvellous attractions that we have grown up with and often take for granted” and that “I agree with her that Kenya is beautiful and brimming with possibilities, which will be unleashed by aligning your investments with our opportunities’ He added ‘My work is to create the best possible environment for that to happen, and I give you my commitment to do my best, and do it quickly.”
Whitman’s organizing a state visit by the Kenyan president to the US was one of her highest achievements politically, as granting a state visit is the most incredible honour the US can bestow on a country. No US Ambassador had been able to do this for Kenya in two decades or for any African country in over three decades. It was also one of the only six countries worldwide during the Biden term.
During this visit, thanks to Whitman’s efforts, Kenya was designated a Major Non-Nato Ally with the possibility of Kenya hosting the biggest military base in Africa. Kenya became the fourth African country to attain that status and the only one in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Bob Wekesa, the Kenyan head of the African Centre for the Study of the United States at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa, as well as a visiting professor at Howard University, described the state visit as a ‘new turn west’ marked by a tectonic shift in depth and breadth not witnessed in Africa in recent times.’ And that Washington was ‘indicating to other continental powers like South Africa that have taken positions antagonistic to the US on Russia-Ukraine war and the Israel-Hamas conflict, that Washington has alternatives on the continent.’
While Professor Makau Mutua, a Margaret W. Wong Professor at Buffalo Law School, SUNY, former chair of the Kenya Human Rights Commission and the Task Force on the Establishment of a Truth, Justice, and Reconciliation Commission in Kenya and a prominent and sometimes extremely harsh critic of Ruto would write:
‘Ambassador Meg Whitman has done yeoman work in bringing Kenya closer to Washington again. The generous economic ‘infrastructure, trade, security, education and cooperation deals President Ruto signed in Washington are nothing short of impressive.
President Ruto’s visit is an enviable one for any one for any state let alone an African one. Not only was there pomp and circumstance, but there was substance. The whole panoply of American power was on display— shock and awe.
All Kenyans need to see President Ruto’s visit to America as a major win and breakthrough for the country.
As a Black man who lives in America, I was proud to see an African president treated with respect.
In her last interview with The Weekly Review, Whitman summed up her achievements as follows:
When I started here more than two years ago, I gave a series of speeches where I asked the question: Why Africa? Why Kenya? Nobody is asking that anymore. The word is out on Kenya’s potential.
Yes, the word is out there, but don’t just be a hearer of the word, be a doer. Contact us at invest@africa-myamericanstory.com about your investment interests and enquiries.