About Meg Whitman
Meg Whitman, the former U.S. Ambassador to Kenya who served from 2022 to 2024, has relocated to New Mexico and is now a resident of the state. In a March 2026 podcast interview, she discussed New Mexico's economic potential, stating that the state is "on the cusp of something remarkable" and contrasting that view with perceptions of historically slow economic growth. She has also participated in events with Elevate New Mexico, a partnership focused on economic development, where she argued that New Mexico needs a full-time, well-paid legislature to fulfill its potential and that the state could become an "energy leader" as artificial intelligence increases energy demand Mend. Whitman has also advocated for a cap on malpractice insurance in the state, saying it would help retain doctors.
During her tenure as ambassador, Whitman was a vocal advocate for U.S. investment in Kenya, frequently delivering a presentation titled "Why Africa, Why Kenya." She argued that Kenya is the "tech capital of East Africa" and the leading destination for venture capital on the continent. She also publicly urged the Kenyan government to address issues she said were important for attracting foreign investment, including establishing a "consistent, transparent, and fairly administered national tax policy" and tackling corruption, which she described as a major challenge. Following the 2024 U.S. election, Whitman resigned her post)Skip. She has since commented on the elimination of USAID, stating that the move is "ceding ground to the Chinese" in Africa and that countries like Kenya, which she described as "very indebted," cannot easily cope with the sudden loss of that aid.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Meg Whitman's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Meg Whitman0:00
So when I came to HP, it is no secret that I came in a troubled time for the company. Multiple CEOs are hard on customers, hard on employees, hard on partners. So the first thing I tried to do was provide a source of stability. And the first decision I had to make was whether or not we were going to spin off our PC business. Within 30 days, we had done an analysis that indicated very strongly that PCs were absolutely an essential part of Hewlett-Packard, that there was tremendous upside in the business for us, there were tremendous supply chain advantages across all our different product lines. So quite quickly we made the decision to keep our PC business and in fact invest in it. Then the next thing I needed to do was understand what the challenges were around making HP easier to buy from from the enterprise perspective, easier for our sales executives to sell, and easier for HP people to get work done. We are a vast and big company, and simplification was going to, in my view, be the key to having HP more efficient and effective. So we started looking at every business process and say, how do we make this simpler? How do we make it easier to go to market? How do we make it easier to make decisions within HP? And that was the origins of putting IPG, our printing business, together with our PC business, and taking our global sales force and asking one of our leaders, Dave Donatelli, who runs ESSN, to take over that global sales force. We also centralized marketing and we also centralized sales operations. So we've gone from many, many decision makers in a market to a small, much smaller number of decision makers. What I believe we've done is we've created a lot more people who can say yes and a lot fewer people who can say no. And of course for a big company like HP, that's absolutely essential. We've also renewed our focus on product. At my core, I care about what we deliver to customers. If we don't have the right product for the right customer at the right time at the right price, if we don't have the best piece of software or the best service, then we lose. So we have doubled down on our focus around great product, and I hope you see that in terms of what we brought to Shanghai today. But we've got more work to do. This is a journey. I have said it will take time to, I believe, restore HP to where it needs to be in every single one of our business units. It will take some time for the results of that incremental R&D to show itself in the marketplace. So I'm very excited about where we are, but this is a journey. I will say the other thing that I have found about HP is we have one incredible group of employees at this company. Everywhere I travel, whether it's in China or Germany or France or Canada or the UK, it is amazing the quality of HP people. And when I came to the company, it had been through a lot, and I wasn't sure whether we would have everyone we needed. I would tell you it is the best group of people I've had the privilege of working with in my 30-year career in business.
