I worked briefly at Xerox when Jeff Jacobsen had just left and John Visentin was hired. From this board, I've seen lots of mixed opinions on Ursula Burns, but find it interesting that her identity is still so tightly associated with Xerox, so guessing they think her time at Xerox was successful?
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She did a great job! Embodied the xerox sm culture of arrogance, cluelessness and dishonesty perfectly.
From engineering side, UB was horrible to work for. She started outsourcing jobs in Engineering way before becoming CEO. When she talked, she was better at making you feel horrible than excited about the job. I remember one townhall meeting where she was 15 minutes late (500 people in a room waiting for her), talked about how we cost to much and need to trim down, and then got a phone call in the middle of all this and left.
Oh and she was the driving force to take over ACS before she was a CEO.
Bottom line she was totally incompetent and never should have been in that job. Her communications meetings were hard to watch as she threw out Xerox buzz words that had no bearing on content or thought.
She was clueless with no product vision or direction. Her five year outlooks were always the same story, yearly layoffs along with job outsourcing and workers be glad you made it through another year.
I have a very hard time believing that Anne set Ursula up for failure maybe the BOD’s but not Anne.
Wonder what Anne is up to these days?
Anne put Ursula in the CEO job. The ACS purchase was put together by Anne before Ursula became CEO, the deal just closed on Ursula’s watch. Ursula had the task of leading a bigoted good-ol-boy culture company. Ursula saw the fact that print and copy revenues were on the steep decline. ACS sleazy lying business culture were the reason the merger failed. The cards were stacked against Ursula in many ways. It’s easy to blast Ursula as the problem, but it’s the lazy and sloppy thinkers thoughts. Xerox failures are directly tied to an overpaid sales organization that couldn’t sell new business. A stacked commission system that paid dozens of people on each large deal, on overpaid and pathetically under qualified directors and VPs, and pure lazy greed. Those who failed to invest in themselves to remain market relevant deserve the bed they lay in.
This is maybe a backhanded compliment or something like that - but it always seemed to me like she wasn’t overly self interested (more than your average CEO - they all are) as much as she was just not competent. To be fair, I maybe wasn’t paying as much attention as I should have been, so I’ll admit I could have missed what you all are talking about with regard to self interest.
Totally agree re: unable to make it through a town hall without sounding robotic. Decisions were weird and didn’t feel like they were tied to a real “story” of what was happening. Say what you will, but having a common thread to understand the intent of changes is huge. Even if those changes fail, you want to understood how and why. Not so with Ursula. Even with John V - as horrible as he can be for the low rung employee - you know exactly what the story is. Every action makes sense when you consider the cost cutting, wall at quarterly numbers motive. (Not saying it’s right, of course - just that it’s clear.) Jacobson, however brief, was good for this too, though he had his own major issues.
Could be naive but following the principle here of “never ascribe to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” Willing to admit I’m wrong on this one though.
I don’t think her heart was in it. In my opinion, she struggled to convey her vision, relay information or for that matter, speak the English language during the town hall calls. She stumbled a lot and I lost respect quickly. She was overpaid. Haha
Ursula managed with a chip on her shoulder.
Had total distain for Xerox employees and was only concerned with embellishing her CEO status and augmenting her pay and golden parachute.
If Ursula had made smart decisions, even if they had been painful at the time, I would support what she did.
Instead, she shortened the life of this company by a decade or more by the wasteful, incorrect decisions she made.
Anne M pulled the company out of the depths. She spent a ton of time getting into the details of every business unit, learning how they operated, and putting them all on a profitable path forward.
And in just a few years Ursula destroyed every bit of progress that had been made.
Out of her we got a preview of what the country is in store for at least the next four years in this country. The same atmosphere, arrogant behavior, and poor decision making process that brought Xerox down is reflected in today's political leaders.
The post below is mine.
Just to be clear, I am a female and share the same EEOC code as Ursula.
Replying to @qgt+190dNF3A:
Ursula got the CEO position because she was a woman and a particular EEOC code. She was an engineer and had no experience running anything.
Ha! As for Xerox, the Fat Lady sang her song, got on the bus and left a long time ago!
Guhhhh! Kind of tired of hearing about how terrible or great a CEO is when in most cases, particularly at old companies, they are just one variable in the equation and usually not the most important one.
Whose decision was it to hire Ursula? If she was soooo terrible why was she hired in the first place and why was she allowed to stay in this position for 7 years? How much power did she have when it came to vision, strategy, tactics? What resources were available? Now take a look at the board of directors in 2009... now look today... Any thoughts?
This thread is just another symptom of the larger problem at xerox. Its all academic/therapeutic now b/c the fat lady is almost done warming up.
She was a train wreck of a CEO. The only thing is give her credit for was being at the fore-front of the CEO parade that had no vision of growth for xerox.
What else would she be associated with? What else has she done?
She was the worst ceo Xerox ever had. Bought acs for 6.4billion sold for 1.8 billion a few years later. Gutted and outsourced most of r&d. Derailed a plan to utilize techs and manufacturing to work on equipment in different industries. Flowed all profit from Xerox service(only profitable division) into acs/conduent. Set the stage for ican to walk in.
But she's black and has a v—na so can suffer no criticism from the msm.
Forgot to provide the link:
https://www.cnbc.com/video/2021/01/14/fmr-xerox-ceo-ursula-burns-on-capitol-hill-riots.html