Politics & Power Quote by Meg Whitman

Whitman’s line lands like a corporate confession: product building, at scale, starts to resemble campaigning. The comparison to “being a politician” isn’t just a cute metaphor; it’s an admission that power in the platform era is negotiated, not bestowed. Users aren’t simply customers with preferences, they’re constituencies with moods, grudges, and fleeting loyalties. You don’t “serve” them once; you keep winning them back.

The phrasing does a lot of quiet work. “Sometimes” softens the provocation, as if to reassure skeptics that business isn’t pure spin. “A little bit like” further hedges, but the hedge is the point: she’s acknowledging the optics-management layer without calling it manipulation. Then comes the technocratic pivot: “We have work to do in understanding our users’ sentiments.” It’s corporate-speak that reframes emotion as an analytics problem. Sentiment becomes something to measure, model, and ultimately manage.

Context matters: Whitman is a late-20th/early-21st century executive voice, formed in a period when companies like eBay scaled into quasi-public institutions. Once a platform mediates trust between strangers, “sentiment” is not fluff; it’s infrastructure. The subtext is that legitimacy now comes from perception as much as performance. Reliability, safety, fairness, and “community” are not only operational goals; they’re narrative commitments.

What makes the quote work is its uneasy honesty. It reveals the modern executive’s dilemma: you can’t run a marketplace without persuading people they belong in it, and persuasion starts to look suspiciously like politics.