(FORTUNE Magazine) – MEG WHITMAN IS FOND OF SAYING that good personnel decisions are about finding the right person for the right job at the right time. Her recent decision to re-pot three senior managers in the eBay garden sends a clear message about one person she seems to think is in exactly the right post: herself. That's right. Despite showing up regularly on lists of executives who might succeed Michael Eisner at Disney, where she once worked, the moves suggest she's not leaving eBay anytime soon. Instead she is giving some of her top prospects exposure to new businesses and in the process setting up a competition to succeed her that is reminiscent of the years-long horserace to succeed Jack Welch at General Electric. Whitman acknowledges taking "inspiration" from GE as well as from A.G. Lafley. The latter, as CEO of Procter & Gamble where Whitman is both a board member and an alumna, likes to help managers plan careers two to fours years out.

Whitman, 48, set this management merry-go-round in motion in early December by sending Jeff Jordan, the 45-year-old head of eBay's core U.S. operations (eBay.com) and an ex--Disney strategist, to run PayPal, eBay's fast-growing electronic-payment system. Jordan replaces Matt Bannick, 40, a onetime Foreign Service officer, who becomes head of eBay's international arm, his second stint in that job. Finally Bill Cobb, 48, the ex--Pepsi marketing executive running eBay's non-U.S. operations, takes over for Jordan at eBay.com, the company's biggest but slowest-growing business. At one level the switches are simply "Management Consulting 101," says Mark Mahaney, an analyst with American Technology Research. Whitman, a former consultant herself (ditto for Jordan and Bannick), likes change for the sake of change. "You get so much energy with a new set of challenges," says Whitman, who recharged her career with jumps from P&G to Bain to Disney to Hasbro before alighting at eBay.

Jordan, who will be able to exercise his strategic chops at PayPal, is the perceived front-runner. His mission: to grow the PayPal business that is unrelated to eBay itself. According to David Robertson, publisher of The Nilson Report, a payments industry publication, off-eBay transactions will amount to $4.5 billion, or 32% of PayPal's transactions this year, up from 27% in 2003. PayPal has become eBay's not-so- secret weapon--and a burgeoning threat to the credit card industry, which finds it tough to serve small online merchants. Jordan is also likely to consider an international remittance business for expatriates to send money home and deals with big online merchants. On the international front, Bannick's job is to focus on Asia, where home-grown websites are proving tough competitors. Cobb will concentrate not so much on signing up new eBay users as on getting existing ones to buy and sell more stuff--a classic task for a marketing guy. The executive with no assignment change, of course, is Whitman. Some plants, it seems, do just fine in the pot they're in, thank you very much. -- Adam Lashinsky