Meg Whitman's big challenge - Retooling HP (HPQ)

At 56, Ms. Whitman, the eBay billionaire who spent a fortune unsuccessfully trying to become the governor of California, has found her Act III. She has been chief executive of Hewlett-Packard for a little more than a year, and many people are still waiting for her to get her message out about the place.

Here it is: Meg Whitman believes in H.P., and believes that this company matters to Silicon Valley, to California, to the world. She believes that Wall Street doesn’t quite get it — doesn’t quite see the promise she sees. She believes that mobile devices, cloud computing and Big Data will re-energize H.P., a company that for a decade has grabbed more headlines for boardroom soap operas than for bold innovation.

“I believe in creative destruction,” Ms. Whitman says in a conference room near her executive cubicle.