Where You Are Is Not Who You Are

Ursula Burns

• Publisher: Amistad
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780062879318
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito aziendale
• Index: Business

The first Black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company looks back at her life and her career at Xerox, sharing unique insights on American business and corporate life, the workers she has always valued, racial and economic justice, how greed is threatening democracy, and the obstacles she's conquered being Black and a woman. "I am a black woman, I do not play golf, I do not belong to or go to country clubs, I do not like NASCAR, I do not listen to country music, and I have a masters degree in engineering. I, like a typical New Yorker, speak very fast, with an accent and vernacular that is definitely New York City, definitely Black. So when someone says I'm going to introduce you to the next CEO of Xerox, and the options are lined up against a wall, I would be the first one voted off the island."

In 2009, when she was appointed the Chief Executive Officer of the Xerox Corporation, Ursula Burns shattered the glass ceiling and made headlines. But the media missed the real story, she insists. "It should have been 'how did this happen? How did Xerox Corporation produce the first African American woman CEO?' Not this spectacular story titled, "Oh, my God, a Black woman making it."

In this smart, no-nonsense book, part memoir and part cultural critique, Burns writes movingly about her journey from tenement housing on Manhattan's Lower East Side to the highest echelons of the corporate world. She credits her success to her poor single Panamanian mother, Olga Racquel Burns—a licensed child-care provider whose highest annual income was $4, 400—who set no limits on what her children could achieve. Ursula recounts her own dedication to education and hard work, and how she took advantage of the opportunities and social programs created by the Civil Rights and Women's movements to pursue engineering at Polytechnic Institute of New York.

Burns writes about overcoming the barriers she faced, as well as the challenges and realities of the corporate world. Her classmates and colleagues—almost all white males—"couldn't comprehend how a Black girl could be as smart, and in some cases, smarter than they were. They made a developed category for me. Unique. Amazing. Spectacular. That way they could accept me." Her thirty-five-year career at Xerox was all about fixing things, from cutting millions to save the company from bankruptcy to a daring $6 billion acquisition to secure its future. Ursula also worked closely with President Barack Obama as a lead on his STEM initiative and Chair of his Export council, where she traveled with him on an official trade mission to Cuba, and became one of his greatest admirers.

Candid and outspoken, Ursula offers a remarkable look inside the c-suites of corporate America through the eyes of a Black woman—someone who puts humanity over greed and justice over power. She compares the impact of the pandemic to the financial crisis of 2007, condemns how corporate culture is destroying the spirit of democracy, and worries about the workers whose lives are being upended by technology. Empathetic and dedicated, idealistic and pragmatic, Ursula demonstrates that, no matter your circumstances, hard work, grit and a bit of help along the way can change your life—and the world.

Leave Behind More Than You Take Away

There was a huge uproar in the press in July 2009 when I was appointed chief executive officer of Xerox: the headlines proclaimed that I was the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company and that for the first time the CEO mantle had been passed from one woman, Anne Mulcahy, the outgoing CEO, to another. What a ridiculous way to make history. Though both headlines were factually correct, the press missed what was a unique story: How did this happen? How is it that the Xerox Corporation had two female CEOs, one after another? How did the Xerox Corporation produce the first African American woman CEO? That should have been the conversation, not these ridiculous stories proclaiming, “Oh my god, not one but two women” and “Oh my god, a Black woman made it.” Was it truly so amazing to think a Black woman could lead a multibillion-dollar company? I had worked at Xerox for twenty-nine years by then. I had a strong track record. I was very well educated. I hadn’t been plucked from a circus sideshow. I had earned the position.

In that instant, I joined the top five hundred business leaders in the United States out of a population of 306.8 million. That is 0.000163 percent of the total population. And the repercussions were immediate. I got congratulatory calls or emails from at least a hundred other CEOs and from high-profile African Americans. I heard from my good friend and mentor Vernon Jordan, the corporate titan and adviser to President Clinton, and from Ken Chenault, the chairman and CEO of American Express, on whose board I sat. I also received congratulations from many others I didn’t know, like the civil rights leaders Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and the basketball legend Magic Johnson, himself the CEO of the $1 billion Magic Johnson Enterprises. I got phone calls from US senators and members of Congress, and practically every company and nonprofit in the country asked me to join their boards. How many commencement addresses was I asked to make? How many speaking engagements? How many media interviews? My teenage daughter, Melissa, was unimpressed. “The phone’s for you,” she told me that night. “I think it’s a newspaper or something.”

The enormous amount of attention continued for days. I was at our home in Rochester, a midsize city in upstate New York and the manufacturing and engineering headquarters for Xerox at that time. Everyone knew everyone else, so there were smiles and congratulations on the street and in the grocery store and in the dry cleaner’s every time I left the house. There were paparazzi too. It was impossible for me to be unaffected. I’d made it. I’d arrived. I felt terrific but also apprehensive. I was not becoming the CEO of Apple. I was becoming the CEO of Xerox, which had gone through two or three near-death experiences by then. The company had to be led, to be managed, to be strengthened, and it was not going to be an easy ride. Xerox needed a lot of work, and I quickly returned to the company’s nondescript executive headquarters in Norwalk, Connecticut.

There was no lavish suite of offices and anterooms waiting for me, no special floor with private dining rooms, no moving from floor A to a fancier floor B, as so many corporations offer their top executives. That was not the way it was at Xerox, and I liked that egalitarian modesty. I returned to my old office where I’d worked for two years as president of Xerox, kitty-corner to the office Anne had used as CEO. Both our offices were larger than the others in the unremarkable and inexpensive four-floor building Xerox rented as our corporate headquarters, and each had a perk—a private bathroom, one with a shower. There were very few other Xerox executives in that building. The majority of the company’s leadership lived in the field. The head of research and development lived in Rochester, as did the executive who ran manufacturing. The sales executive for the United States lived in New York City, while his counterpart for sales in Europe lived in France.

We had hundreds of offices and buildings all over the world, which now, in the midst of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, seems redundant. One of the questions the pandemic has laid bare is whether we really need to come into an office all the time to do our work. Between Zoom and Skype and Webex and Facebook Live, among others, technology has advanced to the point of making virtual offices feasible for almost all employees. But in 2009, we were still working in centralized locations.

After Anne stepped down as chair, I shifted into the CEO’s office and I asked my chief financial officer, Larry Zimmerman, to move into my old office so he would be closer to me. (There was no longer a company president. We only used that title when we were going through a transition, and that transition had been completed.) Larry was a seasoned executive whom Anne had hired from IBM years earlier. Larry was invaluable to me, older, wiser, very straightforward, and strong. He was a great business partner and asset for me as the new CEO, especially as we were in the process of acquiring a new business.

Another and far more important perk than my private bathroom and shower was the company plane, which saved hours and hours of travel time. I could fly to Washington for a meeting at eleven and be back in Norwalk for a four o’clock meeting. Traveling commercially was a very inefficient use of time. I remember the bad old days early in my career when my team and I had to fly often to Japan to work with our partner, Fuji Xerox, on the 5100 copier, our first joint project. The United flight route then was through Seattle-Tacoma Airport (Sea-Tac), where we too often got delayed for five hours or nine hours or even a whole day because of the freakin’ fog and rain, throwing off the entire schedule in Japan. Sometimes, if the CEO or someone in senior management was going to Japan, we got to fly on the company plane, which made the thirteen-hour trip more bearable but had its own downside. When I became CEO, I rarely flew in our own plane to Japan because of an irrational fear that if the plane went down in the China Sea and it was only me and the pilots, the rescuers might not look as hard for survivors as they would if a big airliner went down.

Closer to home, security became an issue. Shortly after I became CEO, I got an extensive briefing from Jim Danylyshyn, the head of Xerox’s security team. Basically, it was common sense. You’re no longer the normal citizen nobody knows—be extra mindful when you walk in the street—don’t wear exposed expensive jewelry or other displays of wealth. “We damn sure don’t want to have to get a new CEO,” Jim said. “We don’t want the publicity of somebody kidnapping you or somebody stealing from you.” His briefing did not alarm me. It was a rational response to the heightened visibility of all aspects of your life when you become the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.

And there was cause for concern. In 2003, the CEO of Sears, Eddie Lampert, was kidnapped from the garage of his Connecticut office and held for ransom in a Day’s Inn for four days. (Luckily for him, his abductors weren’t very professional. Lampert negotiated a $5 million ransom and convinced his kidnappers that he’d get them the money if they freed him. They did, and Lampert walked into the nearest police station.) An Exxon vice president was not so lucky in 1992. He was ambushed in the driveway of his home in New Jersey, shot in the arm, and left bound and gagged in a self-storage vault where he died four days later.

Xerox had had its own incidents. The president of a Xerox operation in Paris was shot and seriously wounded in the office by a disgruntled ex-employee in 1990, and seven employees were shot to death in Hawaii in 1999 by a fifteen-year colleague who suspected them of conspiring against him. I didn’t have to go that far to understand some of the risks, though I wasn’t particularly worried about my own safety.

I was assigned a security person, a wonderful man named Ivan Rivera, who had provided security for Anne. Ivan, a retired NYC policeman, drove me to and from meetings in New York, flew with me domestically in the company plane, and arranged for security when I traveled overseas. When I was home, I chose to drive my own car from our house in New Canaan, Connecticut, to our offices in nearby Norwalk, unlike some CEOs who never went anywhere without their security. To the consternation of the Xerox board of directors, which took security very seriously, I also often walked home alone to my apartment in New York after functions in the city. I love walking in New York, and it was not unusual for someone to stop me and say, “You’re Ursula Burns!” Thankfully, nothing bad ever happened.

Ivan and I spent a lot of time in the car together—a lot. I almost always sat in the front seat, not only to avoid motion sickness but also because I really enjoyed his company. We talked about everything—his children, my children, basketball games, songs. He was a colleague and friend, and we shared many of the same sentiments. I was in tears once when I called him to change a pickup time. “What’s the matter?” he said, and when I told him I’d been watching the devastating news coverage of frightened and injured children in war-torn Aleppo and wanted somehow to get them out of Syria, he teared up too.

My promotion to CEO came at a perilous time for the US and global economy. The year 2009 saw the end of George W. Bush’s administration and the beginning of Barack Obama’s, an election that brought a lot of joy but occurred during the most dangerous economic time since the Great Depression. The country was slowly beginning to recover from the 2007–2008 global recession, which had been precipitated by excessive risk-taking by banks, the failure of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, and the imminent collapse of the auto industry. Detroit declared bankruptcy, the stock market tanked, and all over the country many people lost their jobs and homes. It was an unbelievably bad time for the economy and for every US company, including Xerox.

The US government was one of our largest customers, along with the banking and auto industry. Xerox faced a heightened risk of bankruptcy because those sectors were so strained that payments were delayed indefinitely. Xerox was primarily a business-to-business (B-to-B) company, which means that we sold to other businesses, unlike business-to-consumer (B-to-C) companies like Proctor & Gamble or Nestlé, which sell many of their products to end consumers. As the world economy slowed down, our business slowed down, everybody’s business slowed down. Spending was tightened around the world, and optimism was low.

In retrospect, the economic crisis that started in 2007 and continued into 2010 is nothing compared to the financial catastrophe caused by the pandemic of 2020. Multiple countries shuttered businesses and did not allow them to operate, and rightly so. You could not manufacture anything; you could not leave your home to go to your office. The economic system, as we knew it, was literally put on stop—not hold. The earlier crisis was difficult, to be sure, but the pandemic has created financial challenges that make that time seem like child’s play. As of this writing in October 2020, some countries are beginning to open up, but the long-term effect of the financial freeze is unknown.

When President Obama took office in January 2009, the impacts of the 2007–2008 financial crisis were still not fully known. To get better insight into how businesses were recovering and how the government could help, President Obama began holding small lunches at the White House for business CEOs. I was invited to one in June of that year. Though technically I was still president of Xerox and not yet the CEO, I was the heiress apparent. As part of my transition to CEO, Anne had asked me to stand in for her at several high-level meetings, and the White House lunch was one.

Because of Anne, I already knew quite a few CEOs, including my fellow lunch guests: Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T; Muhtar Kent, CEO of Coca-Cola; and Dave Cote, CEO of Honeywell. (I had spoken to the leadership team of Muhtar’s company a few times, once on women’s leadership.) They were all really good guys and successful leaders, and we became good friends. CEOs have lots in common even if they work in different industries: tax and regulation, trade, and immigration policies affect every industry. The companies represented at this White House lunch faced similar economic strain because of the fiscal crisis.

The unknown at the fifty-minute lunch in the president’s private dining room was the president himself. I had met him once before his election but just to shake his hand. What was kind of amazing at the lunch was the immediate connection that I, and I think all of us, felt to him. He was serious, kind of casual, knowledgeable, and fun. And that’s a good foundation on which to build a relationship.

Nothing earth-shattering came out of the brief meeting from a factual standpoint or a detailed action plan. It was instead an opportunity to listen to this brand-new president and feel one another out, like on a first date.

We turned out to be cheap dates. Demonstrating the president’s seriousness regarding ethics and any conflict of interest, we got billed for the lunch! The government does not fund the business world, Obama pointed out to us, so when businesspeople came to eat at his place, he was not going to pay. I chuckled at that, but he was right. Why should the taxpayer pay for a meal we could definitely afford on our own? At least we got to eat. In a subsequent business meeting at the White House with the heads of the country’s biggest banks, including Jamie Dimon from JPMorgan Chase and Lloyd Blankfein from Goldman Sachs, the CEOs were only served water!

The first time I’d met Obama was bittersweet. Vernon Jordan introduced me to him at a reception in New York in 2008 after Obama had defeated Hillary Clinton in the Democratic presidential primary. As much as candidate Obama was impressive and as much as I would support him in his bid for the presidency, I was a big supporter of Hillary. I had worked closely with her when she was the senator from New York and I was the head of the manufacturing and supply chain at Xerox. I had been truly impressed by Hillary’s interest and her grasp of the most minute details of the business challenges Xerox was facing at the time, and she became a personal friend.

My Black friends were surprised by my primary choice. I was often asked, “You mean to tell me that you supported Hillary over Obama?”

I’d respond, “Why would that be surprising?”

“Because you’re Black.”

“Well, I’m also a woman.”

I’m not surprised that people felt this way. In the Black hierarchy, Blacks are more coalesced around being Black than women are about being women. And there’s good reason. People make up their mind about how they see you, and race is the defining attribute. If you’re a Black American woman, you’re seen first as Black, not as a woman, whereas if you are white, you’re seen first as a woman.

Despite my early support for Hillary, I became a huge supporter of Barack Obama after the Democratic presidential nomination, and I was delighted to meet him again in the White House.

At the White House, I was struck by the access I had to the highest echelons of power by virtue of my pending title at Xerox. My upcoming job as the steward of an $8 billion company not only afforded me a seat at a private lunch with the president of the United States and with other CEOs, but also access to those who made public policy for the country.

Soon after I became CEO, I joined the Business Roundtable (BRT), a pro-business lobbying group made up solely of CEOs that meets regularly with government. We gathered three or four times a year in Washington, where the BRT rented three floors of a building near the Canadian embassy. The space was not glamorous. I was surprised the first time I went that we all sat on little folding chairs. The hundred or so of us who opted to join—some CEOs chose not to engage—were all on different committees representing business-related policy issues: education, finance, energy, infrastructure, and immigration.

The CEOs were a pleasant and quite informal group. We didn’t have a special CEO handshake or badge. A number of issues naturally brought us together: the burdens of this or that tax, the longshoremen’s strikes that tied up import and export at the harbors in California, the need to reach out for recommended people to fill board seats. We bonded over shared business concerns and spoke more or less the same language, but did I feel I belonged in the CEO club? Not really.

Part of it was that I was a woman and part because I was Black. I was one of a kind. But I also had a different background and different interests and spent time in different social circles. In short, when you look at the most common attributes and characteristics of a CEO, I had very few of them.

I didn’t feel lesser, however. By that time, I was accustomed to not being part of the mainstream. It was just that I had not shared the life experiences of the other CEOs. Their conversations about summer homes in Kennebunkport or Nantucket or going hunting or on winter skiing trips to Jackson Hole or the Swiss Alps with their children and grandchildren were totally foreign to me. That was not where I was from.

My single mother and I had never taken a vacation. I’m not sure I even knew the word as a kid. From the age of fourteen, when I’d gotten my work papers, I had worked after school, every weekend, and every school holiday, mostly at the checkout counter at Woolworths or in special summer jobs created for poor inner-city kids. Skiing? What was that? Tennis? Really? Swimming? No way. I’m convinced that the colleges that require a swimming test for graduation created that requirement to keep poor kids from applying. And though I’d had the means for quite a while to do all the things the other CEOs were talking about, it didn’t occur to me. I had no history of this type of behavior. My husband and I had created our own vacation patterns, like visiting cities in Europe or going to Bermuda, where he had family. I still don’t know how to swim.

The biggest gap between me and the other CEOs was golf. I didn’t golf. I had no interest in golf. It took hours out of the day when I’d much rather be with my family. But golf was a huge pastime with the CEOs, especially at Augusta National in Georgia, the site of the Masters golf tournament. Forget that Blacks weren’t allowed in the club as members until 1990 and that women were barred until 2012, when Condoleezza Rice, George W. Bush’s former secretary of state, and Darla Moore, a South Carolina financier, were invited in, followed by Ginni ...