Word: toughness
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...because I tend to have a smile on my face, but I'm maybe a little more devilish and firmer than people realize," he says, looking very much like a grownup version of the impish comic-strip kid. "You can have a smile and be quite firm--it's tough love with a little bit of humor built...
...Tough love is a very fitting description for the Chicago native's eBay tenure so far. In the nine months since assuming the top job, the former Dartmouth basketball player, 48, has shown a penchant for shaking things up. In October he acquired three companies on the same day that he laid off 10% of eBay's 16,000 workers worldwide--a way to boost efficiency in a tougher economic climate...
That's where Donahoe's tough love comes in. First, he's acquiring companies like Bill Me Later, a payment system, and Danish classified-ad sites that have synergy with eBay's brand. He's also re-evaluating whether to spin off Skype, the voice-over-IP phone-system acquisition that was Whitman's biggest mistake, not to mention a $1.4 billion write-off. eBay overpaid for a company that doesn't directly benefit the core business. Donahoe also launched a new search platform to better catalog the 120 million live listings...
Next Donahoe clamped down on fraud to build trust to keep customers coming back. "In the Meg Whitman days, eBay didn't have any customer service," says Lindsay of Sanford C. Bernstein. "If something went wrong, it was tough luck, buddy." Today if a buyer pays for the transaction through PayPal--a payment company owned by eBay that has seen tremendous growth--the sale is guaranteed for the full price...
...fashioned and hermetic economy - needs much qualification. Recent historical research has stressed that China was modernizing and internationalizing fast, if imperfectly, in the half-century between the late Qing dynasty and the outbreak of war with Japan in 1937. And for all his twinkling eyes, Deng was tough. Together with a group of party elders, it was he who gave the go-ahead for the army to crush the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in 1989, snuffing out the hope that real political reform would accompany changes in the economy...