Meg Whitman is among America’s most recognized veteran corporate leaders, known for displaying confidence and canny boldness while driving profits and engineering restructurings at high-profile tech companies. She began her professional career at Procter & Gamble’s corporate headquarters and today serves on P&G’s board of directors. In 2019, Whitman and her husband, Griff Harsh, M.D., bought an ownership stake in FC Cincinnati from Carl Lindner III, majority owner and CEO.
Her long-time ties to Cincinnati notwithstanding, she’s the FC Cincinnati ownership group outsider; nearly every owner is from the Cincinnati region, and all but Whitman, who lives in California, are from the Midwest. “She has rolled up her sleeves,” says FC Cincinnati President Jeff Berding. “She’s involved, but with a level of dispassion from afar that’s enormously valuable to Carl and me. She’s not here every day, and the relationships aren’t as apparent to her. So she can question things with a little bit of distance and sees things a little more clearly than we see them here.”
Whitman’s investment “came in at a critical time for us that allowed us to reach our ambitions and beyond,” Berding says, largely referring to the construction of TQL Stadium. “We came out of enormous success at Nippert Stadium, where we were averaging 28,000 fans, and wanted to build the largest soccer-specific stadium in the country, with the most suites and the most club seats. But every additional 1,000 seats is $10 million extra in costs. Without Meg’s investment, we couldn’t have pulled it off in the manner we did. And then we likely don’t host USA-Mexico [World Cup qualifying match in November] because we wouldn’t have had the resources.”
Berding says FC Cincinnati is one of the top three or four revenue teams in Major League Soccer and partly attributes that success to Whitman’s tenacity in attracting sponsors “from some of the biggest companies in the country.” He says Whitman lines up meetings with prospective donors, and, when Berding joins via Zoom, he enjoys the reaction that her participation elicits. “Folks are pretty excited to be on a Zoom call with Meg Whitman,” he says.
A native of Long Island, New York, Whitman solidified a reputation for tech innovation in Silicon Valley as CEO of eBay Inc., where she oversaw its growth from 30 employees and $4 million in annual revenue to more than 15,000 employees and $8 billion in annual revenue. Later, as president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard, she took the reins of a significantly challenged company and implemented an ambitious turnaround plan. A Princeton graduate with a Harvard Business School degree, Whitman famously made a run for the California governorship in 2010 and has held executive-level positions at Hasbro Inc., The Walt Disney Co., and Bain & Co. In addition to serving on the P&G board, she’s a member of the board of General Motors and is the national board chair at Teach for America.
In December, President Biden announced he will nominate Whitman to serve as Ambassador to Kenya, an appointment that would not affect her FC Cincinnati stake, Berding says. “We are proud she’s been nominated to this role. It’s an exciting adventure for her and Griff. She says she’s going to try to stay involved in supporting our efforts, which I welcome. Maybe she’ll find some players in Africa to come play for FC Cincinnati.”
Also actively working to build FC Cincinnati’s future is William Harsh, Meg’s son, who is visible in town “supporting our efforts around mixed-use development,” Berding says. District Wharf in Washington, D.C., is a model for what FC Cincinnati owners envision creating adjacent to TQL Stadium, and they’ve enlisted Wharf architects and global design firm Perkins Eastman to assist. “Any real estate development north of the stadium on property we own and control will clearly be led by FC Cincinnati,” Berding says. “We have owners who are experienced in mixed-use development supporting those efforts, including the Whitman family, and Will specifically.”
A few days after the U.S. Men’s National Team beat Mexico at TQL Stadium, Whitman speaks via Zoom about the factors that inspired her to invest in FC Cincinnati and why she believes the Cincinnati region is poised for bigger things and greater prominence.
Illustration by Eliot Wyatt
WHAT HAS GUIDED YOU TO MAKE SOME OF YOUR CAREER DECISIONS TO TAKE LEADING ROLES IN HIGH-PROFILE COMPANIES?
In college, I thought I wanted to be a doctor. Then I got into the pre-med courses, Organic Chemistry being one, and I said, “Not sure this is quite what I had bargained for.” I was selling advertising for a college magazine and I said, “Hmm, you know, selling advertising is kind of like business. I think business might be something I would like.” That’s how I ended up going to Harvard Business School. From there, my guiding principle was take the very best job you’re offered wherever it was. And trying to balance that along the way with my husband’s career and our two children.
There wasn’t a direct path out of Harvard Business School to being CEO of eBay. There were a number of stops along the way. I tried to find the very best company where I would get the best training and position me for whatever came my way down the road. It was somewhat intentional, there was a philosophy, but there were lots of twists and turns.
STARTING OUT AT PROCTER & GAMBLE…
My first job out of business school. In fact, I worked there for the summer, between first and second year at business school, and then took a full-time job.
WHAT ARE SOME OF YOUR IMPORTANT TOUCHPOINTS YOU HAVE TO THE CINCINNATI REGION?
When I graduated from business school, I knew I wanted to be in marketing. Then as now, the academy company for marketing was Procter & Gamble. P&G offered me a job in Cincinnati, and I said, “OK!” I lived in Mt. Adams as a young professional and really enjoyed the river and the parks and the hiking and the Midwest feel. I’m not from the Midwest, but I liked it very much. It’s easier living than in the big East Coast cities. I spent the first couple years of my career there, and then decided I was going to get married; my husband was training to be a neurosurgeon.
We moved to San Francisco after a couple of years, but Cincinnati has always held a very fond spot in my heart. When eBay came around, [P&G CEO] A.G. Lafley called and said, “We’re looking for younger board members with digital experience, with internet experience. Would you ever be interested in being on the P&G board?” I said yes, because I thought, What a great situation to come full circle to the company that gave me a start and serve it on the board of directors.
P&G IS EXPERIENCING A CEO TRANSITION NOW, A SITUATION YOU’VE BEEN THROUGH A FEW TIMES IN YOUR CAREER. WHAT ARE SOME OF THE OPPORTUNITIES A LEADERSHIP CHANGE PRESENTS TO A COMPANY?
P&G is a bit of a different company from most, because there is a promote- from-within philosophy. It’s why I joined P&G back in the day, because they said, “Hey, any of you who are joining P&G today, you could be CEO.” By definition, you have a pool of candidates who know P&G, its core values, its mission, its giving back to the community, how it operates as a global player. All the candidates for CEO know the company inside out and upside down, which in my view is a real benefit. And there’s been a proven track record among those executives in the environment in which they would potentially be the CEO.
There are always CEO transitions, because people come maybe in their mid-50s and stay eight, 10 years, and then it’s time for another person. The No. 1 job for the board of directors is to pick and then coach the CEO. Our board has gotten to be quite skilled at doing this. I think we made a great choice with Jon Moeller. I’ve known Jon for many, many years. David Taylor did a remarkable job, and I think Jon will do just as remarkable a job.
THROUGH YOUR INVOLVEMENT ON ITS BOARD AND COMMITTEES, P&G LEANS ON YOU FOR TECHNOLOGY, CORRECT?
I have been a member of the technology committee, which is a little different from Silicon Valley. It’s IT technology, yes, but it’s also chemistry, physics, biology, and biotech that make all of these P&G products. It’s been great fun for me.
GOING INTO THE NOVEMBER WORLD CUP QUALIFYING GAME, WHAT WERE SOME OF THE EXPECTATIONS OF FC CINCINNATI AROUND HOSTING THE GAME AT TQL STADIUM?
It was super exciting for the city, for FC Cincinnati, and for TQL Stadium. The stadium and Cincinnati looked great to a world audience. There were fans from 50 states and from something like 25 countries. It was Cincinnati’s turn on the world stage. The game was great [a 2-0 U.S. win]. It’s one of the reasons I was interested in FC Cincinnati as a place to make a professional sports investment, because I knew the commitment of Carl Lindner III and his ownership group.
At the time of my investment, the stadium was not built but was on the drawing boards. The training facility was built, and the commitment was there to create something the city of Cincinnati could be proud of. I think the U.S.-Mexico match was sort of an instantiation of something that Cincinnati could be proud of.
FC CINCINNATI IS ESSENTIALLY A STARTUP. TALK ABOUT ITS IMPACT AT THE NEIGHBORHOOD LEVEL IN THE WEST END AND ITS PLACE IN A GLOBAL SPORT THAT’S GROWING.
When Carl and Jeff started the United Soccer League team several years ago, it was a raw startup; there was nothing before it. They had to figure out where they were going to play. They had to figure out where the training facility was going to be. So a huge amount of credit goes to them for really starting out with a plan to do a USL team, become a winning team, graduate to MLS, and build the right facilities that Cincinnati can be proud of.
The team’s core values are first of all to have a winning team, and we have work to do there. Second, contribute back to the community in a meaningful way. And that was the decision to build in the West End, a historically Black neighborhood adjacent to Over-the-Rhine, which only in the last 20 years has become what it is today.
Soccer appeals to a very diverse demographic, tends to be younger and more family-oriented than some of the other sports. That was really a big part of what Carl and Jeff laid out. That resonated very much with our family values. Because we had a warm spot in our heart for Cincinnati, and I thought, Listen, Cincinnati is a growing city and an up-and-coming city in the Midwest. I very much appreciate the high-tech incubators that have been started downtown. They’re going to pay big dividends. GE is splitting into three companies, one of which is GE Aviation, another Fortune 500 company in Cincinnati, is great.
A CORPORATE PRESENCE LIKE GE FEEDS STARTUPS AS WELL AS MIDDLE MARKET COMPANIES THAT ARE SUPPLYING IT AND ADDS TO A DIVERSE BUSINESS COMMUNITY.
That’s right. We have been very pleased by the sponsorship revenue and ticket revenue [for FCC]. We’ve sold out all our premium seats. We sold out most of our suites every game when we could have a full stadium, though sometimes we couldn’t because of COVID. I would say that the people of Cincinnati and the large, medium, and small companies in Cincinnati have all been big supporters. That’s important in a city like Cincinnati. You have to get the whole community to pull together.
When you’re in a big town like L.A. or New York or San Francisco or even Chicago, only portions of the community get behind the team. In Cincinnati, Kansas City, St. Louis, and Nashville, you need the whole community to get behind it. And that’s what has happened.
HOW IS FC CINCINNATI CONNECTING THE CINCINNATI REGION TO GLOBAL AUDIENCES AND OPPORTUNITIES?
Cincinnati is more of a global city than you might imagine. That’s in some part due to its heritage as a place where a lot of Germans arrived on the scene 100-150 years ago. P&G now has a very diverse senior leadership team, which involves about 30 people; I’d say probably half are non-Americans. And so you’re constantly seeing a new group of folks coming into Cincinnati who bring a different perspective from Asia and Latin America and Europe. A lot of Americans, by the way, have gone to Geneva and Singapore and Miami for P&G. There’s the core of a real global community here.
Soccer is a world sport. You could argue that the U.S. has a small portion of the world soccer interest. The European leagues are probably much more important to some degree than MLS. Maybe they won’t be in 10 or 20 years, but they are right now. And so having that World Cup qualifying game in Cincinnati at TQL Stadium really shone a bright light globally on the city. If you’re a European company thinking about where you’d want to put your U.S. headquarters, maybe you think, OK, Cincinnati, they seem like a worldly city, and they’ve just held this World Cup qualifier. Things like that make a difference.
HOW DID YOU COME TO MEET CARL LINDNER III? DID YOU KNOW HIM PRIOR TO FC CINCINNATI?
I did not know Carl. I knew his father because I’d been in politics. When I ran for governor of California, his father was a supporter of mine back in the day, but I’d not met Carl III. And so when we decided as a family to invest in professional sports, the first question was what sport. And we ultimately settled on soccer because we thought it was the sport of the future. I like to invest behind trends, and I liked the trends behind soccer.
Then the question was, What team? We talked with lot of different teams, a lot of different ownership groups. And we had heard that Carl might be interested in selling a minority position to someone like us. So my family flew to Cincinnati and met with the Lindners, Carl and Martha and their family. There was a nice meeting of the minds, and we’ve gotten along really well from there.
YOU’VE TALKED ABOUT HOW FCC AND SOCCER HAVE CHECKED THE RIGHT BOXES OF YOUR INVESTMENT DECISION MATRIX. E-SPORTS AND GAMING ARE IN YOUR PURVIEW AS WELL. WHY IS MEG WHITMAN INVESTING IN THESE SEGMENTS?
We did a similar analysis. E-sports is growing rapidly. I think it’s another one of those sports-related entities that’s going to be a huge business 10, 20 years from now, if you look at just the number of people playing video games. The League of Legends’ Finals several years ago was at Beijing’s Olympic Bird’s Nest stadium; thousands of people watched them in person and millions watched online. There were more people watching the finals of that game online than the Super Bowl. Those statistics really caught our interest. And much like we made an investment in soccer, we made an investment in e-sports, and we’ve been really pleased. These are long-term investments; you could almost think of them as generational assets.
ONE OF YOUR SIGNIFICANT INVESTMENTS IS IN A PROFESSIONAL VIDEO GAME ORGANIZATION.
It’s called Immortals Gaming Club, and the team we own is the Immortals. That team has sub teams playing different games.
P&G HAS INVESTED IN SPONSORSHIPS IN THE E-SPORTS SPACE. IS THAT A GROWING PART OF WHAT THE COMPANY WILL BE DOING?
I think every company is looking at where the growth areas are. Sports, broadly defined, is very attractive to companies because sports bring us together in a polarized environment. That crowd at the U.S.-Mexico game wasn’t from blue states or red states—it was the United States against Mexico.
When you look at sports fans for NFL games or baseball games or soccer games or hockey games or whatever, everyone’ s rooting for their team and it brings us together. So I think it’s an important place for companies wanting to interact with those communities and advertise to them. It’s a really nice place to be right now.
TALK A LITTLE BIT ABOUT HOW PLAYING SPORTS HAS BEEN AN ASSET TO YOU PERSONALLY. HOW HAS THAT EXPERIENCE HELPED YOU HONE YOUR LEADERSHIP AND TEAM-BUILDING SKILLS IN YOUR CAREER?
I played all kinds of sports as a little girl, in high school, and in college. I was a swimmer, I played squash, I played tennis, I played lacrosse. In high school I played field hockey and many other things. What I learned from those experiences is I love being part of a team. It really is the power of many, and I think we’re all better when we’re working together. What you learn from sports is to play your position and to contribute to the team’s success.
The whole often is greater than the sum of the parts. And so I think it influenced my leadership style and how I put together the best team I can. I have a saying: The right people in the right job at the right time with the right attitude. I learned that playing sports.
The other thing I learned over time is that situational leadership is really important. What’s the situation in which you find yourself? The situation at eBay—where I joined as employee No. 30 and took it to 15,000—was quite different than the situation I found at HP, which was a company facing real challenges. One is a fast-growth startup with the industry’s wind at your back, and the other is a 75-year-old company that’s fallen on some pretty tough times; what you do in those two situations is quite different.
The other thing I’ve always found to be true is focus, focus, focus. The key is to figure out the 20 percent of what you could do that’s going to bring you 80 percent of the value, which is really hard because usually there are 20 things you want to do. But what are the things that matter most, and set them up and knock them down; set them up, knock them down. My experience is that doing three or four things at 100 percent, as opposed to 10 or 15 things at 30 percent, produces much better results.
YOU HAVE DESCRIBED CINCINNATI AS A CITY ON THE MOVE. WHAT IS YOUR VISION FOR A BETTER CINCINNATI? WHAT ARE THE CINCINNATI REGION’S GREATEST OPPORTUNITIES AND STRENGTHS?
I’m a big booster of Cincinnati. It’s a remarkable city that’s beautifully located from a geographical point of view right there on the river, with all the parks. I mean, it’s a beautiful city, right? It’s an entrepreneurial town anchored by some very big companies, which is important. It has three major pro sports teams, which many cities the size of Cincinnati don’t have. It has a lot of the arts, whether it’s the Aronoff Center or the Symphony, and punches above its weight. If you look at the fan base for FC Cincinnati, we have some of the highest home attendance figures in all of Major League Soccer. So more people go to soccer games in Cincinnati than they do in New York or L.A. I think that’s a real testament to the city and the support that it shows for its teams.
LIKE OTHER CITIES, WE’RE FOCUSED ON SOLVING COMPLEX PROBLEMS, SUCH AS HOUSING INSECURITY AND ECONOMIC MOBILITY. CORPORATE LEADERS ACROSS THE REGION ARE ASKED TO TAKE A LEAD ROLE IN SOLVING THESE ISSUES. TALK ABOUT WHAT’S IMPORTANT ABOUT RUNNING A COMPANY IN A TIME OF GREAT CHANGE AND UNCERTAINTY.
First and foremost, you have to continue to focus on your customers. Every successful business is customer obsessed. Despite all the stuff that’s going on around, just like, How do we best serve our customers? In FCC’s case, it’s the fan experience—you know, how do we deliver on that?
The second thing is the pandemic in many ways is going to help a city like Cincinnati, because not everyone feels they have to live in the big cities. Now they can live where the quality of life might be more affordable or what they’re looking for. So I think there’s an opportunity here for Cincinnati to grow faster than it otherwise might have.
As a CEO, I always thought that if I could focus on just one thing from a community perspective, it would be K-12 education. If we can provide a great education to every student kindergarten through high school, that solves so many of our problems, whether it’s economic mobility or income inequality. If you have that quality education, you can go on to make a life for yourself.