Ursula's ACS purchase was the beginning of the end for Xerox. She ultimately deserves the blame for destroying the company. Let's thank Mulcahy for putting Burns at helm.
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Professionally, if there was one person to blame for Xerox's demise, I would put it on Deason unless one goes way back in time and drops the hammer on successive Xerox leaders who said no to the internet, operating system, keyboard, etc.
In 2009, the traditional copy and print business was already dying. Everyone knew it. Burns had two choices. Shrink the company and put everything into one or two successful product lines or diversify the company's business portfolio and reduce its risk by moving outside of Xerox's traditional product lines through an acquisition.
With so much unknown as to how the market would look ten years down the road in 2009 (and, of course, with some egos involved), she chose the later. At that time, business services, i.e. outsourcing, was still the rage; but, it was maturing as it consolidated via M but, she made the wrong acquisition.
Ursula = smug liberal thought she was going to land a big position at the WH when Hillary won....Ha She currently serves on several companies board of directors. Good luck with that...
ACS might have been a good purchase if it was what it was billed to be. Check the facts. The lawsuits for botched implementations started rolling in shortly after the purchase was finalized. Xerox didn’t need to destroy ACS, it was already imploding when Xerox purchased it. That’s what makes Deason’s actions even worse in my mind. He made out on the ACS sale at the expense of Xerox but that wasn’t enough. He had to do everything in his power to pull as much cash as he could out of Xerox even if it means destroying the company.
Actually ACS was a great strategic diversification move. The problem was we (Xerox) did what it does best-force unbearable process on a lean, efficient company. We spent b/millions trying to do this culture shift, which seriously hindered our revenue growth investment options. If Ursula is responsible for that then the comments are valid. Yet the idea was a great one, because it enabled us to succeed in a growing space in light of declining legacy revenue. The process overkill killed it, never detected the healthcare service ineptitude or was unable to fix it. Today, as we have begun this same culture shift on a top performing subsidiary (GIS), i hope lessons were learned but I don’t see evidence of that. Layer upon layer of non-GIS mgmt are now involved almost assuring a similar outcome.