#LeadershipTuesdays: My Greatest Mentor...Ursula Burns

"My mother raised us to think that if we worked hard, and if we put our end of the bargain in, it would work out OK for us."

--Ursula Burns, former CEO and Chairwoman

On Tuesdays, WOMENATLIBERTY presents Leadership Tuesdays, a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. In 2009 Ursula Burns was named CEO of Xerox and in 2010 she became the Chairwoman of the company succeeding Anne Mulcahy. Ms. Mulcahy, a history maker in her own right, was the first female CEO of Xerox. She hand picked and mentored Ursula to become her successor. Burns characterized their relationship as a "true partnership".  A career that started with her working as an intern culiminated with Burns making history as the first African American woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. In May 2017, she retired from the company after more than 30 years of service.

Anne Mulcahy as well as many others including her husband, Lloyd Bean, have mentored her; but when she talks about her mother, you hear the emotion in her voice and you understand the deep respect this native New Yorker holds for the woman she calls her greatest mentor. Olga Burns was a hardworking single mother who believed that education would be Ursula and her two siblings' passport out of the housing projects into a bright future. She says her mother was right and she is eternally grateful for her mother's sacrifices.

Olga Burns

In today's #LeadershipTuesdays feature, Ms. Burns goes back to the place where she grew up and went to school to share with CNN Money's Cristina Alesci how her humble beginnings shaped her, helped her make decisions about her life and prepared her to become the well respected leader that she is today. To see the video, go to womenatliberty.com. For more information on Leadership Tuesdays or WOMEN AT LIBERTY, click here. 

*You can also view the interview by clicking here.

#LeadershipTuesdays: Personal Leadership...Ursula Burns

Who you are is about your character, it’s about the amount of energy you put into things, it’s about how much control you take of your whole life.

--Ursula Burns

Every other Tuesday, WOMEN AT LIBERTYprovides Leadership Tuesdays, a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage and strengthen women leaders. For more information on Leadership Tuesdays and WOMEN AT LIBERTY, click here.

#LeadershipTuesdays: When Its Okay To Be Inpatient...Ursula Burns

“We all need to be more impatient with the status quo. I believe we all need to shift the emphasis of our thinking -- from why we can't create more jobs to how we can create more jobs… from why we can't compete to how we can compete… from why hunger, poverty and injustice exists in the world to how they can be eliminated...In other words, we all need to be a little more impatient.”*

--Ursula Burns, Chairwoman and CEO, Xerox

Every other Tuesday, WOMEN AT LIBERTY presents Leadership Tuesdays, a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. There is no new feature today. However, please see our blog archives of recent features on Mellody  Hobson, Jessica Alba, the importance of trust to an organization, business ethics, how to manage conflict and more, check the right side of this page. For more Leadership Tuesdays features, go to our website here: womenatliberty.com. You may also visit our Facebook page, Women Making History, for additional postings on leadership and other topics of interests to women.


*Source: http://www.xerox.com/assets/images/corporate/pages/about-xerox/leadership/CEO_landtop_en-us.jpg

Getting People To Follow You...Ursula Burns

“Getting people to follow you is all about belief. The way to get people to follow you is to tell them a story that they’re in, that looks good.”

--Ursula Burns, CEO, Xerox

Every other Tuesday, WOMEN AT LIBERTY presents Leadership Tuesdays, a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. The resource for this week is an article from The Glass Hammer on Xerox's CEO, Ursula Burns. The writer, Melissa J. Anderson, shared highlights from a recent speech given by Ms. Burns at the Catalyst Awards Luncheon in New York where she discussed her perspective on "Impatience and Leadership".

To read the story, click here. For more on Leadership Tuesdays, click here.

Don't Lose A Golden Opportunity To Speak Up...Ursula Burns

“If you’re sitting around the table but you say nothing, that’s a lost opportunity.”

--Ursula Burns, CEO, Xerox

Norm Betts/Bloomberg News

Every other Tuesday, WOMEN AT LIBERTY presents Leadership Tuesdays, a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. Today's resource is an article from The Glass Hammer on Xerox's CEO, Ursula Burns. The writer, Melissa J. Anderson, shared highlights from a recent speech given by Ms. Burns at the Catalyst Awards Luncheon in New York where she discussed her perspective on "Impatience and Leadership".

To read the story, click here. For more on Leadership Tuesdays, click here.

Be Yourself and Lead...Ursula Burns

"You can probably be somebody else and follow all your life, but you cannot be somebody else and lead." 

--Ursula Burns, CEO, Xerox

Every other Tuesday, WOMEN AT LIBERTY provides a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. Today, Leadership Tuesdays continues a series looking at the why women are not seeking advance degrees in business at the same rate as they get other professional degrees and why women are not proportionately represented in senior leadership positions in business.

Meg Whitman's mom gave her some of the best advice that a mom can give any child. That advice has served her extremely well. Sadly, her mom's words still does not apply equally to all women in the United States much less to women around the world.

Taking a look back to the Fall of 2004, Carlotta Mast wrote an article that appeared on the Graduate Management Admission Council's website,gmac.com discussing why women continue to make up less than 50% of the student body at business schools. As stated in her article, companies and business school all say that want to increase the number of women in their leadership positions and programs. But why isn't this happening?

To read her article, click here. For more information on Leadership Tuesdays,see here.

Appreciating Men Who Appreciate Women In Leadership...Ursula Burns

"There’s something to be said for the men who’ve known that we [women] can do what we do without becoming them."*

--Ursula Burns, CEO, Xerox

Twice a month on Tuesdays, WOMEN AT LIBERTY provides a platform for a variety of voices and resources to develop, encourage, and strengthen women leaders. Our last Leadership Tuesdays for this Women's History Month's of 2012 features Stephanie Cole Hill of leading defense industry contractor, Lockheed Martin. An engineer by training, Ms. Hill was recently promoted to President of Information Systems and Global Solutions-Civil where she leads the 10,000 employees of this multi-billion dollar business unit. Presently, Ms. Hill is the only African American President at Lockheed Martin and she reports to Ms. Linda R. Gooden, Executive Vice President of Information Systems and Global Solutions and the other African American woman in executive leadership at Lockheed Martin. (Ms. Gooden was profiled and featured in Leadership Tuesdays in September 2011.) 
 

In March 2012, Ms. Hill had the distinct honor of being profiled for Women's History Month in The Root by her prominent older sister, Harriette Cole, a best-selling author, Today Show/MSNBC contributor, president of her own media company and former editor at Essence Magazine. To view this Leadership Tuesdays' feature on Ms. Hill, click here. For more information on LeadershipTuesdays, see here.

*Quote via Jenna Goudreau, @jeanna_goudreau, Forbes

Ursula Burns...Embracing Who You Are As A Woman and Leader

"I struggle to stay exactly who I am. If we work hard to normalize everybody toward the corner office stereotype, then I don't understand what the purpose of having women lead versus having men lead is. So have all the men lead". 

--Ursula Burns, CEO of Xerox

From Leadership Tuesday's 5/10/11 feature at WOMEN AT LIBERTY.