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Ursula Burns
From a Lower East Side housing project to the top of Xerox — and blunt about who did not follow her there.
The rise
Born in New York in 1958 to Panamanian immigrants and raised by her mother in the Baruch Houses on the Lower East Side, Burns took an engineering degree at Brooklyn Polytechnic and a master's at Columbia. She joined Xerox as a summer intern in 1980, rose through manufacturing and supply chain, and became president in 2007.
What they did
Named chief executive in July 2009, the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company, and chairman in 2010, she bet on services with the $6.4 billion purchase of Affiliated Computer Services, ran a company of some 130,000 people, vice-chaired then chaired President Obama's Export Council, and in 2016 split Xerox in two, spinning off Conduent, before stepping down at year's end.
The full picture
Printer and copier sales fell through her tenure and the ACS bet did not deliver the promised growth; under pressure from Carl Icahn she unwound it by splitting the firm. Xerox shares fell 27% in her last two years while the S&P 500 rose 8. The Fujifilm merger that collapsed in 2018 came after she left the chair in May 2017.
Why it matters
Raised in a housing project by a single mother, she ran one of America's best-known companies — and has been blunter than most about how few Black executives followed her, refusing to be proof the problem is solved.
“I don't feel it as a compliment. I don't see myself as being exceptional in any way.”