Greetings from Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, Broadsheet readers. You can watch the conference live beginning at 8am PST on our newly-launched MPW channel. Also, follow us on Twitter and Instagram for a backstage look. Please read on to see what HP CEO Meg Whitman said last night about her company’s big news. Have a great Tuesday!
EVERYONE'S TALKING
• Warren Buffett serenades Fortune's Carol Loomis. Last night at Fortune's MPW Summit dinner, Warren Buffett and singer-songwriter Paul Anka paid tribute to journalist Carol Loomis, who recently retired from Fortune after 60 years with the magazine. Set to the tune of My Way, Buffett and Anka sang to the attendees about Carol's famed career. Our favorite lyric? “You took no sh*t and did it your way." We've got the video. Fortune
FROM THE MPW SUMMIT
•Mylan's Heather Bresch won't back down on tax inversions. Earlier this year, the pharma company CEO pursued a tax inversion deal with British drug company Abbott Labs. It’s on Congress to “fix the broken tax code” and make America an attractive place to domicile a company in the global economy, she argued. Fortune
•Want to perform your best? It might be time to quit your job. “I always found myself coming up against the same sort of nightmare scenario: A voice that said, ‘You need to make a change,'" said Bridgette Heller, EVP and president of Merck’s consumer care unit, during a panel on "Finding Your Genius." Fortune
•Fortune MPW Summit: What to watch for. Fortune’s Leigh Gallagher outlines what she’s most excited to see at this year’s Summit, including interviews with Jane Lauder and Mary Barra. Fortune
BROADVIEW
HP's Meg Whitman on split: 'Succession planning is absolutely essential'
Meg Whitman knows better than anyone that a company is only as strong as its team. When she took over struggling Hewlett-Packard in 2011, she was following a trail of failed chief executives and walking into a famously-dysfunctional management structure. Now, as she prepares to split the 75-year-old tech giant into two separate companies, she's focused on her staff more than ever.
"Succession planning is absolutely essential," Whitman told Fortune's Pattie Sellers Monday night at the Most Powerful Women Summit in Laguna Niguel, California. "Bill Hewlett and David Packard founded the company when they were 25 years old in 1939, and they ran the company for 50 years... When they left, the succession planning was not what you would hope it to be. Over the course of the last 15 years, there have been about seven different CEOs. This is the fundamental problem: The CEOs had different strategies, different approaches and the organization sort of went from strategy to strategy."
Whitman spoke just hours after HP announced plans to separate its enterprise hardware and services business from its PC and printer business. With succession planning top of mind, Whitman promised her board that the CEO of the newly-named HP Enterprise would come from within. She'll be in that job, and also will serve as chairman of the PC-and-printer company, which will be called HP Inc. The CEO there will be HP insider Dion Weisler.
"To come from the outside as I did and learn five new businesses in a time of incredible change is not the right thing," she said.
Click over to Fortune.com to read my full story.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
• Instagram hires first COO. Marne Levine, Facebook’s VP of global public policy, is now Instagram's chief operating officer. Levine is a longtime protege of Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, and serves on the board of her Lean In organization. Re/Code
•The 25 highest-paid women. In 2013, top earning females brought home an average of $16.1 million in total pay. Martine Rothblatt, CEO of United Therapeutics, topped the list with $38.2 million. Fortune
•The next battlefield for workplace gender discrimination? Next June,the Women’s World Cup in Canada will be played on artificial turf while the Men's World Cup is played on real grass. The world's best female soccer players are now teaming together in court to sue the Fédération Internationale de Football Association on grounds of discrimination. Quartz
•Angela Merkel’s biggest enemy? The German Chancellor is Europe’s longest-serving leader, yet her predecessor does not think very highly of her. Helmut Kohl once said that when it comes to the intricate politics of Europe, Merkel “has no idea.” Time
•Deloitte's Christie Smith: Create a transparent work environment. Smith, a managing director at Deloitte, says she tries to identify authentic people when hiring new colleagues. "Doing this enables a more candid and open dialogue that will allow you to better understand a person’s perspectives and professional interests and to gain insight into their core values," she wrote for Fortune's newly launched MPW Insider network. Fortune
•Women’s empowerment conferences on the rise. Fortune's MPW Summit has been around since 1999, yet more and more publications are starting women's conferences of their own. “I feel like we’re reaching kind of a saturation point,” Lesley Jane Seymour, editor-in-chief of More told The New York Times. “I feel like it’s everywhere. Everybody’s doing it; everybody’s trying to get in on this.” NYTimes
ON MY RADAR
What's the point of a First Lady? The Atlantic
Why I will no longer speak on all-male panels Macleans
The forgotten female programmers who created modern tech NPR
Gillian Anderson: Sexism is 'easy to miss' and 'easy to get used to'HuffPost
Mormon women see priesthood meetingNYTimes
QUOTE
What people want most of you is your focus and attention. You are destroying that when you think you are multitasking.
Wendy Clark, SVP of the Global Sparkling Brand Center at The Coca-Cola Company, yesterday on a Fortune MPW Summit panel titled <em>The Connected (Not Over-connected) Leader</em>.
