> She's a very good manager when it comes to taking a successful business and making it a lot more successful.
Bit of a leap to conclude that right just based on eBay?
eBay would've had astronomical growth under a dog as CEO. As you mentioned:
> She definitely made eBay much bigger than it would have been without her, but it was already successful and growing when she joined.
And that's her one success story. She's had plenty of other opportunities to demonstrate management competency. I think there's a cognitive fallacy where we assume someone is good because they were there and we lived through things with them.
But as others have said, just look at her wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman
I think we should challenge ourselves when defending people just because they were there and they didn't fail.
I don't care how brilliant she was at delegating to managers across categories, etc., the world needs space for better leaders than e.g. those who support Prop 8 (were anti-gay marriage) etc. Like if you don't have empathy there, then it's unlikely you're going to be a better manager than, again, my dog.
A manager needs to be a leader. Perhaps she can delegate and she has an MBA from HBS and she's well-connected in Silicon Valley (I remember her connections to Scott Cook at Intuit, etc. - so much bad shit happened under their watch though, poaching, etc.).
But I don't think any of her behavior (unless you have concrete examples) makes her "brilliant" or a "good manager" - unless the standards are pretty out-of-date. We really should not be defending people who don't evolve (and who are financially very taken care of and have every opportunity to earn trust again, but don't).
UPDATE. I see some examples now in the other comments. Personally I'm not convinced. But that's just me.