Burns, Ursula

Impact on the world

Joining Xerox as a summer engineering intern in 1980 and rising through 29 years of engineering, manufacturing, and strategy roles, Burns was named CEO in July 2009, succeeding Anne Mulcahy in the first female-to-female CEO transition at a Fortune 500 company; she immediately led the $6.4 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, the largest in Xerox's history, pivoting the century-old copier company toward business-process services, and in 2016 executed the complex split of Xerox into two independent public companies, Xerox Corporation and Conduent. President Obama appointed her to lead the White House's national STEM education program (2009-2016) and, later, the President's Export Council; after Xerox she chaired and ran the telecom company VEON, co-founded the private equity firm Integrum Holdings in 2021, and has served on the boards of American Express, Uber, ExxonMobil, and Nestlé.

Life & background

Born September 20, 1958, in New York City, and raised by a single Panamanian immigrant mother, Olga, in the Baruch Houses public housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side, Burns attended the Catholic all-girls Cathedral High School on tuition her mother covered through ironing, daycare, and cleaning work. She earned a bachelor's degree in mechanical engineering from what is now NYU's Polytechnic Institute in 1980 and a master's from Columbia University in 1981, joining Xerox full-time immediately after. She married Xerox research scientist Lloyd Bean, who became a stay-at-home father to support her career until his death in 2019, and has a daughter and a stepson; she published her memoir, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are, in 2021.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; CNBC; EBSCO Research Starters