eBay

• First to market as a significant online marketplace.
• Has huge market volume, trading data, and user community.
• Has significant resources to employ and commands many aspects of trading (finance, advertising, inventory via seller community, international expertise).
• eBay supports the community. A lot of people can make their living off this marketplace, and many more people can supplement themselves or their businesses. It's a great venue for a good many different niche markets.
• eBay is a pretty green company. If anything, this might be a little understated.

eBay, as a marketplace, is easy to game unfairly. Likewise, excellent contributions within the organization will likely be attributed to somebody else, or more likely, ignored or significantly undersupported and unappreciated.

Success is not what you can do, but "how you play the game."

"Playing the game" means supporting upper management initiatives, the technological or methodological flavor-of-the-day initiatives, and getting credit for being the loudest and most loyal proponent. Many of these initiatives are absurd on the face of it; others eventually play out to some kind of clearly detrimental effect.

The principles behind the initiative are simply lost. People thoughtlessly apply what they are told to the point of actual contradiction with those principles.

When you read about a demoralizing management practice at any large American software company, you know it's an issue at eBay (e.g., stacked ranking of individual contributors, over-reliance on contractors, too many layers of management, frequent meaningless changes in structure and responsibility, "not-invented-here" syndrome, innovation only by acquisition).

eBay is so successful at metrics of the 0.5% accumulative gain that it simply cannot see significant opportunity before it. It's as though game-changing ideas simply do not apply at eBay because 500% better just does not fit on their scale, or a community member or another technology group will object to the change.

Congratulations on achieving your level of success, but this is not about you and your accepting credit for a market and community that has been developing for 15 years.

Success is not manufactured at the top of the organization but rather it is the sum of the efforts of the lowest rank and file members.

You simply cannot innovate from where you are in the organization, except of course by getting out of the way and allowing others to do your innovating for you.

The best you can do is insist that your subordinates do excellent work and then work yourself as diligently as you can to determine which efforts are working out best and support them.