Currently ranked as the 17th most powerful woman by the Fortune magazine, Ursula Burns is the first African-American woman CEO to head a company in the Fortune 500 list and became a Chairwoman of Xerox in May 2010.
She was born on the 20th of September 1958 and spent her early childhood in the Baruch Houses of New York City with only her mother raising her. Her parents emigrated from Panama and she truly admired her mother who always tried to tell her that she can define her own life and not give way to the stereotypes of the time.
As she remembers in an interview “many people told me I had three strikes against me: I was black. I was a girl. And I was poor.” But education would change all that and her mother managed to raise enough income from a modest wager to send her to Cathedral High School which was a catholic all-girls school that would prepare their students to become either nuns, teachers or nurses but none of these options seemed suitable for the young Ursula.
After this she went to Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute that offered a different path for her and although she was hopeful at first, her former preparation wasn’t going along with the engineering classes, so she had to make a lot of efforts to keep on track. Beginning with chemical engineering, she realized this wasn’t something she enjoyed so she changed fields and obtained a bachelor of science degree in Mechanical Engineering from the NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering in 1980 and one year after that a master of science in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University. In this period she also worked for Xerox as a summer intern and joined the company full time in 1981 after receiving her master’s degree.
Product development and planning was her main focus at work and she had different roles in this field but in January 1990 Wayland Hicks, who was a senior executive then, offered her a job as his executive assistant and was promoted to this post for a period of nine months. Her engineering education made her always try and improve the conditions around her; if something seemed to work she would ask herself how can these works better. She would later state that “the world should be run like a good business. A good business has a community, customers, employees, shareholders as part of its customer set. A good business has to balance, over time, excellent results for all of them – not just one.”
She got married to Lloyd Bean then and after her vacation she became the executive assistant of the chairman and chief executive Paul Allaire, working on this post until 1999 when she was named the vice president of global manufacturing. In 1992 she gave birth to her daughter Melissa and they also have a stepson called Malcom who was born in 1989 and studied at MIT.
Then she rose once again up the corporate chain in 2000 when she was named senior vice president and started working closely with Anne Mulchay who will soon become the CEO of the company. This was a turning point for the company due to the restructuring of Xerox to become the leader in color technology and document services, with new research and development sections that brought new products on the market. Their collaboration was highly productive and they both described their work relationship as a true partnership. After Mulchany remained as chairwoman in July 2009 it was a natural succession for Ursula to take her place as the CEO.
She began her work as chief executive officer with the largest acquisition in the history of Xerox, incorporating Affiliated Computer Services for the sum of 6.4 billion dollars to allow the extension of the company reach into fields like IT outsourcing or services. So once she took lead the company changed direction from the printing hardware toward business services and even if revenue fell in 2013 due to the worldwide change to digital mediums, the investors didn’t give up their trust in the company since stocks keep rising at a rate of 34% each year. She transformed Xerox from a copy and printing company into one specialized in technology and services that allowed the paperless future to still include Xerox in it.
In March 2010 the US President Barrack Obama appointed her the vice chair of the President’s Export Council. 20th of May 2010 is the date when she became chairman of the company to lead the 140,000 employees spread over more than 180 countries and she is also in a board director for the American Express Corporation and Exxon Mobil Corporation. There are a lot of professional and community boards in which she is involved such as American Express, Boston Scientific, FIRST, the National Association of Manufacturers or the MIT Corporation to name only a few and she served as the Vice Chairwoman for the Executive Committee of The Business Council in 2013 and 14.
Forbes magazine lists her each year as one of the 100 most powerful women in the year and her determination is clearly impressive, knowing what she wants and being able to adapt to each circumstance. Remembering the environment where she grew up, she asks herself why some of her former neighbors are still there or dead and her answer is that she was just luckier. This made her try and find ways of influencing the luck of other people so that they would have more. The same philosophy was transported to business and instead of just trying to perfect the conditions that were given to her, namely the office infrastructure and document technology for the Xerox devices, she sought new ways of resolving problems.
Calling herself a “chief storyteller” she considers her purpose in the company to describe the direction in which things are going and make everyone feel involved into the action, even get passionate about their role. Reading about her life and writing about her you really notice the amount of work needed to be someone in her position and there is quite literally little else than work to keep the titanic tasks set on her shoulders in motion so she is truly an exemplary figure of the contemporary world.
