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Who is Ursula Burns Xerox’s CEO ?
Ursula Burns is as close as you can get to a celebrity chief executive. She is the first African-American woman to lead a Standard & Poor’s 100 company and, at least by postcode, from the wrong side of the tracks. But Burns is not really interested in all the brouhaha. “My gender and my race – they are what I am. They are not special or unique to me,” she says. “It’s Xerox [that has allowed] someone different from the main to get here.”
Burns keeps her feet on the ground: “If I allowed myself to get crazy I wouldn’t do normal things, but I ride the subway, I take the bus in New York City.”
Burns’s childhood has been well documented. She was raised by a single mother, “a low-income person with a very firm set of beliefs”, who managed to send her to a fee-paying, all-girls Catholic school in a neighbourhood that “was not very safe [and] not very clean”. However, Burns says that once you got through the door of her Baruch housing development home in lower Manhattan, “it was a fairly normal house”.
Growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, racism came with the territory. “I was in the north, so we didn’t have segregated bathrooms, but [it was] very clear that blacks were treated very differently from whites, and poor blacks were treated differently from regular blacks; women, across the board, were not considered,” she says. “We had three things going against us – [being] poor, black and women.”
Against all the odds, Burns went on to study mechanical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, and, as she puts it, “the rest is history”. As a student, Burns was keen to start earning, but a GEM bursary (which promotes underrepresented groups in post-graduate science and engineering education) allowed her to get her masters from Columbia University.
Her first work experience was with the company she now runs. “When I walked in the door as an intern, I was fairly outspoken, [with] strong opinions – sometimes wrong and strong. I had the look and banter of someone from New York City,” she says.
“Today, I still speak as fast as hell and have very distinct views about how the world should go and grow. I don’t play golf. I like certain kinds of music. I dress and look a certain way.”
She never experienced pressure to fit in. “I was never told: ‘In order for you to do A, you must change B.’ They never asked me to compromise on things that were too hard to change, because they made me the person I was,” she says.
Burns says the reason she stayed put at Xerox was that she “never got bored. I never stayed in a job longer than I could learn it and improve it, I never got stuck anywhere”. By fast-tracking her career around the group with spells in the UK and Japan, she “worked in lots of different companies” while never actually leaving the business.
She now encourages her staff to be as direct as she is. “People would say all the time, ‘I knew this wouldn’t work’. And I would say, ‘Well, if you knew this wouldn’t work, then why didn’t you say so?’ If you know things, you should take a stand.” A tendency for reticence in corporate life is not something she values. “I think it’s easy to be quiet, and I can’t imagine why we would reward that,” she says.
Xerox has had to transform itself from supplying copiers to providing a business process and document management service. “We have assets in innovation, we have an asset in a global reach, we have assets in some great people and we have a brand that’s just amazing. We are really good at process and difficult problems,” Burns says by way of explaining the decision to buy Affiliated Computer Services, the world’s largest diversified business process outsourcing company, for $6.4bn in 2010.
“It was a huge decision because it was a big company and you had to finance it. But it wasn’t a huge decision in the sense that the fit meant we could make better music if we were together,” she explains.
On the question of diversity, Burns is optimistic: “There will be more women; we’re lining up.”
She believes that women “need a little help from society”; that men and spouses have to comprehend that there will be times when “you are going to pay a little more attention to your children than your competition”.
“Men are not always nice to women when they are few,” she says, adding that this must change. But, she warns, “It’s not going to take five minutes to fix.”
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970203716204577014361246255688.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
Overheard: The Fed’s Printing Problem
Further evidence you can’t always print your way out of a problem? A Xerox WorkCentre 5150 photocopier is causing angst among Washington’s economics press corps—and some Fed officials. The copier in the Treasury Department room where reporters huddle for Fed releases keeps jamming. That delays distribution of the Fed’s formal policy statements, which are faxed to the press room under embargo before they hit the world’s financial newswires.On Wednesday, the mischievous machine jammed about a half-dozen times while reporters were trying to make copies of the Fed’s statement. In September, it jammed about 10 times and froze before a reporter had to run down the hall to another copier to make duplicates for the newsroom.
Ironically, Fed officials have been having high-level discussions on how better to communicate their policy intentions to the public. Perhaps at the next meeting, irritable copy machines should be on the agenda.
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