“I was told ... you should never let them see you sweat. I remember hearing that and saying, ‘Oh, my God! I think that they have to see you sweat.’ ”



ORLANDO, Florida - Hundreds of Xerox sales representatives recently flew here from around the United States for an annual meeting. The main attraction is a face both familiar and new: Ursula Burns. She’s an old friend to many of them after her 30 years at the company.

But there is also a new distance , given that she is no longer just Ursula. She is Ursula M. Burns, the C.E.O. And even though she became chief executive in July, taking over from Anne M. Mulcahy, she has spent months working on the details of a huge Xerox bet, the $6.4 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, an outsourcing company.

Her elevation to chief executive represented two firsts: an African- American woman being named C.E.O. of a major American corporation and a woman succeeding another woman in the top job at a company of this size.

“The accolades that I get for doing absolutely nothing are amazing ? I’ve been named to every list, literally, since I became the C.E.O.,” Ms. Burns says. “ The accolades are good for five minutes, but then it takes kind of a shine off the real story. The real story is not Ursula Burns. I just happen to be the person standing up at this point representing Xerox.”

She wants Xerox’s 130,000 employees to get over the past, take more initiative and be more frank with one another to ratchet up performance. “Terminal niceness,” is how she describes an aspect of Xerox’s culture .

Maybe the “Xerox family,” she says, should act a bit more like a real family. “When we’re in the family, you don’t have to be as nice as when you’re outside of the family,” she says. “I want us to stay civil and kind, but we have to be frank ? and the reason we can be frank is because we are all in the same family.”

By all accounts, Ms. Burns, who is 51, has never been shy about speaking her mind. It’s how she wound up working alongside Xerox’s top leaders at an early age.

She studied mechanical engineering in college and graduate school and joined Xerox as a summer intern in 1980. Through her 20s, she worked in various roles in product development and planning.

In 1989, she was invited to a work-life discussion. Diversity initiatives came up, and somebody asked whether such initiatives lowered hiring standards. Wayland Hicks, a senior Xerox executive running the meeting, patiently explained that that was not true.

“I was stunned,” Ms. Burns recalls. “I actually told him, ‘I was surprised that you gave this assertion any credence.’ ” A few weeks later he asked her to meet with him in his office. She figured that she was about to be reprimanded or fired.

Instead, Mr. Hicks told her she had been right to be concerned but also wrong for handling it so forcefully. Then he told her he wanted to meet regularly with her. He offered her a job as his executive assistant.

Ms. Burns continued to speak her mind inside Xerox . Paul A. Allaire, Xerox’s president, held monthly meetings with top managers, and Ms. Burns and other assistants were invited to sit in .

Ms. Burns noticed a pattern. Mr. Allaire would announce, “We have to stop hiring.” But then the company would hire 1,000 people. The next month, same thing. So she raised her hand.

“I’m a little confused, Mr. Allaire,” she said. “If you keep saying, ‘No hiring,’ and we hire 1,000 people every month, who can say ‘No hiring’ and make it actually happen?”

Later, the phone rang. Mr. Allaire wanted to steal her away from Mr. Hicks, so she could be his executive assistant.

After working for Mr. Allaire, Ms. Burns spent much of the 1990s leading teams in areas like the fax business and office network printing. She was named vice president for global manufacturing in 1999. In July of last year, she was named C.E.O.

All the leadership advice she’s received through the years is now being put to the test. Some of it she has decided to ignore. “One of the things that I was told early on is that you should never let them see you sweat,” she says. “I remember hearing that and saying: ‘Oh, my God! I think that they have to see you sweat.’ ”

In her biggest speech of the day to the sales representatives in Orlando, she talks about “fearlessness.”“That doesn’t mean recklessness,” she says. “This is something I live by all the time and one of the things I want to change.”

“Decide,” she implores the group. “Do things.”


By ADAM BRYANT