The opinions expressed herein are those of the author, and not necessarily those of The New Agenda.

Born in 1958, Ursula Burns grew up in Manhattan to a single-parent household. Her mother ironed clothes and ran a daycare to pay the bills and for her children to attend a private Catholic school. Excelling in mathematics, she later went to the Polytechnic Institute of New York and received a well-deserved degree in engineering. After college, she moved to grad school and earned her Master’s from Columbia University.

She began her career at Xerox as a student intern and ended up staying. A decade after her internship, she was offered the position of executive assistant. In 1999, she became vice president for the global manufacturing department. Unfortunately, around that time, Xerox was in a terrible state of disarray due to “Abrupt management changes and a bungled reorganization of the sales force” as well as “an extensive investigation of its accounting practices” Fed up with the constant drama, Ursula Burns considered quitting. The place she began her career was no longer recognizable.

“You don’t know how important leadership is until you come face to face with a terrible leader,” Burns said.
“Bad leadership can cause serious damage almost overnight. Business author Jim Collins looked at companies that had great success, and found that the thing all of them had in common was great leadership, no matter what they were selling.”

Fortunately, in 2001, Anne Mulchay replaced G. Richard Thoman as the CEO and saved the company from disaster. She reduced the size of Xerox and introduced new products to build the company back up. When Barry D. Romeril resigned as chief financial officer in 2002, she was quick to replace him with Lawrence A. Zimmerman. She also promoted Ursula Burns to be the “first president of Xerox’s Business Group Operations”, which made her “responsible for the engineering center and five separate divisions; together her group brought in 80 percent of Xerox’s profits.”

In 2006, Ursula Burns was listed among Fortune Magazine’s 50 most powerful women. In 2007, she was promoted to president of the company. Mulchay credits Burns with helping to turn the company around:

“For the better part of the past decade, she has been at my side helping to turn Xerox around and more importantly transform Xerox for a new era,”

Last year, Anne Mulchay stepped down and named Ursula Burns as her heir. She thus became the first African-American woman to be CEO of a company as well as the first woman to succeed another woman in that position. In March, Mulchay stepped down as chairman and handed the reins completely to Burns. Mulchay says about stepping down:

This decision is made infinitely easier by the knowledge that I turn the company over to a gifted leader at a point when our strategy is sound, our financial position is strong, and our opportunities for growth are considerable.