When Sheryl Sandberg’s government job ended as chief of staff to the US secretary of Treasury during the Clinton administration, she decided to move to Silicon Valley and look for a job. She didn’t have any experience in the tech industry and because of this, quite a number of companies rejected her. It was not until one day, while interviewing for a job at eBay in the year 2000 with then CEO Margaret C. Whitman (Meg), one of Silicon Valley’s most storied CEOs, that she learned a great lesson she’d never forget. In a podcast “Masters of Scale,” she told the host, “[Meg] said ‘no one has any experience, because no one has ever done this before. I want to hire people with great skills, and I think hopefully you have great skills.’ Ms Sandberg learnt a hiring lesson from Meg Whitman, one that she’d never forget.
Fast forward to 21 years later, Meg Whitman faced a similar situation as Ms Sandberg, but now sitting on the other side of the table. On December 08, 2021, U.S. President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate Meg Whitman, for Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Kenya. Meg, a household name, is one of the most successful business executives in the US and former candidate for Governor of California. She is the former CEO of Quibi, a streaming content platform for mobile devices, and a former President and CEO of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, the Hewlett Packard Company, eBay, and FTD. But one thing was missing; no prior government/ diplomatic experience. Well, she took up the new challenge armed with sheer determination and passion to make a difference. She was confirmed in a unanimous vote by the U.S. Senate as the eighteenth United States Ambassador to Kenya on July 14, 2022.
It’s been a year since Ambassador Whitman took up this job. She has become a household name, not only in Kenya but across the region. Many describe her as Kenya’s brand ambassador, all thanks to her spirited economic and trade efforts in marketing Kenya as the ideal destination for investors. Every chance she gets, be it organizing trade summits in the U.S or at conferences in Kenya, her message has been clear, “Kenya is open for business. It is abundantly clear to me, and I hope by now it’s clear to you too.”
On Capital Lifestyle’s 25 Questions October 2023 Edition, on a beautiful afternoon in Nairobi, filled with scented purple veils of Jacaranda outside, it is an incredible honor to have a chat with Ambassador Whitman for an insightful, thoughtful and personal interview.
1. If you had to choose 3 words to describe yourself, what would they be?
I would say inquisitive, competitive and I would say, fun. I am the youngest of 3 children, raised by a mom and dad and I think like so many women who have been in business, or medicine or whatever, thinks they were often raised by quite a powerful mother and she had a huge influence on me and really convinced my sister and I that we could do anything that we wanted to do and we believed her which was sort of amazing but she always encouraged us to ask questions and so I think that inquisitiveness comes from her.
Then I was a competitive swimmer, from a very young age and when you are 5’6’7’8 nothing is more fun than winning, so I sort of learnt to love the competitive aspect of swimming and the hard work paid off on things like that.
And fun. I have always loved to see the fun side in things in life and well, life is too short for people not to have some fun along the way.
2. What was your dream job or career when you were a teenager?
Hmmmmm I had a number of them. I grew up in the space age so there was a while as a little girl I wanted to be an astronaut. I thought that was so much fun because I remember the first moon landing and I thought that would be really fun. But by the time I got to college, I wanted to be a doctor, and my brother is a doctor and I think, had my mother been born in a different era, she was born in 1920 where there were not as many opportunities for women, uhmmmm I think she would have been a doctor.
So, I went to college as a pre-med, is what they call it in the US, and I took biology, chemistry and physics and calculus and all went well until I hit a course in the US, we call ……it’s the pre-med course, that everyone’s takes that is really very difficult. It’s called organic chemistry. At the end of the first semester of organic chemistry, I said I think I need to find a different line of work; this is not for me. Well, so I said, I had worked selling advertising one summer for a student publication. I thought to myself, selling advertising that’s like business, so what’s the closest thing we have to that, and it was an economics major where I went to college and then graduated from college and went to business school.
3. What was your first job?
My very first job, well my very very first job? It was as a short order cook, at a ranch in Colorado in high school. I got a summer job cooking hamburgers, hot dogs, making brownies and cookies and things like that, for the little snack shop that was at this ranch in Colorado. That’s how I got to love Colorado. It was remarkable. But my first job out of business school was at Procter and Gamble in Cincinnati, Ohio. Procter and Gamble, is a very big soap, shampoo company, big consumer products company in the US.
4. Have you tried using M-PESA?
Oh yeah, well not before I came to Africa but yes, absolutely in the last year, it’s so easy, it’s the greatest thing, and it’s really an absolutely remarkable, remarkable company. And I know a little bit about this because when I was the CEO of eBay, we bought PayPal which was at the time the cutting age payment system in the US. PayPal revolutionized person to person payments but I think M-PESA has taken it one step further.
It’s so much easy, so much easier. It’s so ubiquitous; you know it’s a little harder to pay with PayPal in the US then well, more does with some of that but that’s also owned by PayPal but the ability to pay the person on the roadside stand, to pay you for lunch, to pay your mother for her birthday party, it’s just so incredibly easy and ubiquitous.
5. If you could go back in time and give your 21-year-old self-one piece of advice, what would it be?
With the benefit of the 2020 hindsight, In the US we say it’s to play Monday morning quarterback, meaning the games are always on Sundays so its easy to know what you would have done with the game on Sunday. I think I would have been an engineer; I think I would have been a computer scientist or civil engineer or mechanical engineer. Technology has been so much of what’s defined the economy in the last 20 years and I think we are just at the beginning of the technology revolution not at the end of that revolution and so, many good jobs are still going to be created in that sector and every business now is a technology business.
Your business-Capital FM, is a technology business. Agriculture is a technology business. Obviously, finance is a technology business. Fashion is a technology business so having that discipline around technology and that disciplined way of thinking like engineers. Frankly I probably would have been a computer science engineer because then I would have learnt how to code and I think that’s a really valuable skill even if you never code in your career that discipline of knowing how to do it, I think its something very important.
6. What’s your workout routine?
I swim daily. I get up at 6:15am, get in the car to go to the pool, and will be at the pool by 6:45 am. Swim from 7 to 8 in the morning, shower from 8 to 8:30, get dressed and get ready and leave for the Embassy. I try to swim every single day, but I don’t make it every single day. When I used to travel in the US, I would find a pool and almost choose a hotel because it had a pool or it was near a YWCA.
7. Who’s the one person who most helped shape the person you are today?
I would say my mom and dad, but probably my mom more than my dad because he worked full time and my mother was home with my brother and sister and me, and so she had tremendous influence on me.
But as a career, later on in my career, it was probably Frank Wells who was the President and Chief Operating Officer of the Walt Disney Company.
What I loved about Frank is he was partnered with a fellow called Michael Eisner, who was the CEO and Michael was the visionary, and thought of the big ideas, and was the public face of the company and Frank Wells got stuff done. He was the guy who made it happen and it was an excellent partner for Michael because sometimes creatives have 10 ideas, 8 of which are really not that good, and Frank is the one who could say to Michael, that idea about the underground theme park? Not so much and so I admired Frank selflessness, I admired his ability to get things done and his ability to partner with someone who had very different skills than he did.
8. If you had a chance, would you rather take a ride in a matatu or a boda-boda?
Probably A boda boda but with a helmet. You have to remember my husband is a neurosurgeon and so when he was in residency as a neurosurgeon, he saw a lot of people in the emergency room who hadn’t worn a helmet on motorcycles. I think though, boda bodas are fun, or look fun.
One of the things Kenya is going to do with these electric boda bodas that are coming is that they are going to actually have the electricity as a service so that the boda bodas riders/ operators can have an electric battery that will be charged and taken care of by a third party, pulls into the third party, swaps the battery and keeps on going which is pretty cool and they also will have a helmet for both driver and passenger. They have that in Rwanda. If you have been to Rwanda, all the passengers wear helmets.
9. What’s the one thing that drives you, motivates you to keep keeping on?
Interesting. I like to learn new things. I love the idea of figuring things out. That’s why coming to Kenya as an ambassador was fascinating for me because I never worked for the government, our family has never lived outside the United States. I obviously didn’t know Kenya, I didn’t know the Kenyan government, so there’s been so much to learn and I love that part. I just love learning new things, figuring things out and probably 3 or 4 times in a day, I say huh, ‘in this Job, didn’t know that, kind of interesting, I will do this and see what happens. I love that part of it’.
I love working with teams, some people are individual contributors, I am more of a team member, I like working with other people, I like the different points of view so I find it fun to find people that are interesting and capable. It’s more fun than being an individual contributor, but many people love doing just their thing, we are all different.
10. Skills vs experience. In your opinion, what is more important when hiring? This, coming from your experience as a CEO of various leading companies.
I would say actually a little of both. But I look for the raw talent. Someone who can be a good athlete, can do lots of different things so I look for raw talent. Then I look for experience that is relevant to what the job is, then to what skills do they have. I think people can always learn the skills and its hard to learn the inquisitiveness, the ability to figure things out. So that’s why I tend to hire more for talent than actual skills. Then I look for people who are going to be fun to work with. I also look for positive attitude, if I have two people who are equal and one has a glass half full outlook, and one has a glass half empty, I always pick the glass half full. I always pick the optimist: the ‘I think we can figure out how to do that as opposed to the person who says so many reasons why we can’t do that.
11. Many entrepreneurs don’t really admit having failed in their past. Have you? If you have, what’s the one lesson you learned about failure in business?
Oh that would probably be my first CEO job, when I was CEO of FTD, which is Florists Transworld Delivery. I am not sure you have something like this in Kenya. It’s where if I want to send flowers to my mother in California and I live in New York, you go to an FTD florist, order the bouquet then the florist in California delivers it. It was quite revolutionary about 30 years ago and that was my first job as a CEO and I think I did a very good job of understanding the customer, getting the technology right, but I neglected to completely understand that this was a member owned association.
The florists who were the members, they did business with FTD for reasons that were beyond economics. It was their friends. Their was always a convention of the FTD florists and people loved bringing their friends and relatives to that convention and to get to the convention, you had to do a certain amount of business with FTD and I was a little more at that age focused on efficiency and price, and I failed to sort of understand sometimes the whole picture of why our customers chose to do business with the company.
So, I actually ended up getting fired, well because we did turn around the company but not as much as the private equity firm that hoped we would and so after two years, they said we are actually going to move on and I was a little bit devastated but I learnt a lot from that. There is always that old saying that you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes, even though that might be a little exaggerated, because its way more fun to win than it is to lose but I did a lot to learn from that experience which was, what’s the whole reason that customers do business with you, what’s the whole picture as opposed to the financials, efficiencies.
12. What are the three Kenyans towns you have visited, totally loved, and would recommend to anyone coming to the country?
Ahhhhh. The three towns? First, I would say is Naivasha. I think Naivasha is a beautiful spot with lots of different games parks and the lake right there. It is so beautiful.
Then I would say Mombasa, because that’s the second biggest city, right on the beach, with quite a different culture than Nairobi and when you go further a bit, I think Diani and the beaches there are quite spectacular.
Then I guess I might say Kakamega. I like Western Kenya. I had a great trip up in Kakamega where we opened a factory for a company called Nex Gen Organics and it was just fun. The governor was fun, I think he has a very good agenda for Kakamega and I was so impressed with what I saw. I learnt a lot. It’s a pretty town there.
And maybe I should say Eldoret, because the President is from Eldoret. They have lots to recommend for instance, Moi University and their health care system is really quite remarkable.
13. What book are you currently reading?
I actually just started last night Lee Kuan Yew’s book. I have read it before on the history of Singapore (The memoir of Lee Kuan Yew). It has a lot of I think lessons for Kenya. When he become the head of Singapore, Singapore did not have nearly the economy that Kenya has today. It was basically a swamp, but what he did with that country in 30 years is sort of amazing. So, I just wanted to refresh my memory on what were some of the key things that made a real big difference, rule of law, getting some anchor companies there, making it an easy place to do business, and his mission was to attract business to Singapore. And how they are a well-organized, well run country and I read it again because I think now that I am here in Kenya, back then I read it from an American point of view, now I am reading it from a Kenyan point of view.
14. Are you the doting grandmother or the disciplinarian grandmother?
Oh, completely dotting. I was quite a disciplined mother and now these kids are adorable and now you can just hand them back, at the end of the day, right?
15. What is your favorite sport?
I would say probably hiking. My husband just finished climbing Mount Kenya. We do a lot of hiking. We do quite a bit of hiking at the Ngong Hills. We did a fair amount of hiking on safari recently. You have to remember we live in Colorado so there’s a lot of hiking in Colorado back at home.
16. What is your favorite food so far in Kenya?
Hmmmm well I have tried a lot of things but I have to say, Ugali is becoming an acquired taste and I am working on that. Sweet potatoes and the greens that almost look like spinach and it can be quite spicy. That is very good…..hmm what else? You know I think Kenya has so many different kinds of foods, it has Indian foods too, and we have found some restaurants that we quite like.
17. If I was a guest at your dinner table, what dish would you prepare in your home?
I would say it would probably be served family style as opposed to a plated dinner and it would probably be chicken of some kind, a big bowl of different kinds of vegetables, all steamed with lemon and some kind of rice, you know whether it’s wild rice mixed with regular rice, or you know basmati or something like that and for dessert we could probably have cookies and ice cream.
18. Who is the most impactful/inspiring leader you have ever met, sat across, or interacted with?
Hmmmmmm. Well, that’s a hard one. But I would probably say, inspiring………. I would probably say, and I only had a chance to do this once, it was former U.S. President, Barack Obama. He is a remarkable orator and you know when you meet him one on one, he just connects and you can see him in that with large crowds as well and I think he was remarkable and inspirational as the first African American President of the United States. And so, I think he was remarkable.
I would say also probably Steve Jobs. He was the CEO of Apple and he wanted me to be on the Apple board ..…I didn’t say yes, I probably should have said yes. You know this device * holds phone * has changed everything, everything and you have to remember it is only like 12 years old and think about what that has done for people. Listen, the flip phones and smart phones are how everyone in KENYA uses M-PESA. Its just remarkable what he did and created an entire new industry. We were just saying the other day the power in the smart phone is the power of your first PC back in the day.
19. Name one tradition from your childhood that you’ve carried on with your own kids.
We were raised to go camping. When I was a little a girl, so my mother and her best friend, with 8 children under the age of 13, …she had five we had three, two women and 8 children took off on a camping trip to see all the national parks in America. Ok this was in 1963 …it was in 1962 and I will tell you about the next trip. There was something about seeing the natural beauty of America, camping. We didn’t stay in a hotel for three months. We went into what we called a Ford Econoline van. Those are the vans with a little pop up tops so we would pitch tents and sleep in the pop ups top every night, and it was the time of our lives.
So, we have taken our kids to almost every national park where we camp because both of us, my husband and I, we couldn’t take off 3 months to do that trip but going to national parks, camping…we absolutely did that with the kids. The second summer we did the same Ford Econoline trip and only went to Alaska. We spent three months in Canada and Alaska. We drove all the way across Canada into Alaska and so we have taken our kids to Alaska, as well.
20. Heels, flats or sneakers? What’s your style?
Hmmmm flats. I wish I could be in sneakers all the time. I did wear heels early in my career and wore heels when I was running for Governor for California and I have not put on a pair of heels since then. I think they are not very comfortable. I don’t know how many women would actually tell you that. They are not very comfortable. So, if I could wear sneakers all the time, I would.
21. When was the last time you drove a car?
Recently when I was back in the United States. I was staying with my son who lives in San Francisco so I took his car down to get coffee, but when I am back in Colorado, I drive myself all the time. So, it’s really only here in Kenya that I don’t drive myself. You know even when I worked at HP and eBay, we all drove around in our cars. When I ran for Governor, we had a driver for security reasons more than anything else, but I have not driven a car since I have been in Kenya. I am driven everywhere. It’s a little bit of the rules of the American Embassy. I have to say.
22. What’s your favorite part of this job?
I will tell you, lots of favorite parts. I think its been fun getting to know the country. I have a belief that in any organization, be it government or business or whatever, the truth is actually out there in the field. It is not at headquarters and so what you learn by going out there to see farmers or hospitals or the drought-stricken area up in Marsabit or Turkana during the drought, to go see Kentegra and the farmers collecting the pyrethrum flowers or to go see how the HIV/AIDS retrovirals are handed out in Moi University, that’s where the real action is and that’s been really fun. And I think I have been to almost 20 counties and every county is a little bit different, has different opportunities and things like that so it’s been a really good way to get to know the country.
23. What’s one holiday tradition you and your family look forward to the most?
Colorado where we all gather. We own a ranch in Colorado and so we all gather there every single Christmas for two weeks and it’s fun because now we have 3 grandchildren, we have an extended family and that’s been a tradition we have done for 30 years.
24. What advice would you give the youth today?
Well I would say, start thinking about what you want to do a little early than you may. I didn’t start thinking really about what I wanted to do until like when I got to college. I think when you probably hit 8th grade you should be starting to think what do I like doing, what interests me, do I like science, do I like Math, do I like art, do I like dance, do I like reading, what do I like? Do I like to farm? Do I like to play soccer? Oh here you call it football; and then think about what career could incorporate what you like to do because most of the time, what you like to do, is what you are good at and what you are good at, you like and so I think finding your passion, finding what you are good at and thinking about how can I put that to work for a job and uhmmm, some people love to work with young children so how do I put that to work.
We spend a lot of time at work; you have to like it. Mostly we spend more time at work than we do with our families and our friends so you kind of need to like what you do and so just finding what it is, that motivates you. A lot people who like to draw, or paint, or play music, and don’t let your parents or friends tell you what to like.
Then you know you can start talking to people who have that same passion, who might be ready to offer internship that have the same passion, you might be able to under study like if you have a passion for growing potatoes, you could probably figure out how to get some experience doing that.
25. What would you want Kenyans to remember you for, one day in the future when your term ends?
Maybe, she cared a lot about Kenya and she tried all she could to do everything to foster that relationship between Kenya and the United States especially around bringing great jobs to Kenya and allowing Kenya to, you know, export to the United States. Lots of other things too but that’s probably, well, that’s my area of expertise and perhaps where I can add the most value.
(The End)
Location of Interview: Inca restaurant, a distillation of Peru’s diverse culinary heritage restaurant at the rooftop of The Social House. Open for lunch and dinner every day.
(Follow @USAmbKenya on twitter / U.S.EmbassyNairobi/ on facebook )
“25 Questions” is an engaging and lighthearted interview feature designed to reveal the fun and unique aspects of a person’s personality. It’s a playful and entertaining way to explore the quirks, preferences, and imaginative aspects of a person mainly offering a delightful mix of nostalgia, creativity, and humor.