Companies Leading Change: Xerox – First ever woman-to-woman transfer of CEO in Fortune 500

Companies Leading Change: Xerox – First ever woman-to-woman transfer of CEO in Fortune 500

Anne started her career at Chase Manhattan bank where she soon felt that the banking environment was not conducive to developing her talents successfully. Her move to Xerox proved to be the right move. Thirty-three years later, she is in her very last weeks of CEO, the position she was appointed to in 2001.
Know your customer

Anne’s first job at Xerox was in sales. She is convinced that a sales job is an excellent place to begin in an organisation.

“It gives you the best customer perspective; where else do you learn so much about a company and how it is being perceived by clients as in the sales area?” she says.

“In addition, sales are quantitative; if you reach your targets, it is clear who the best performer is. Therefore it is a great place for women to start a career; the system of measuring achievements quantitatively levels the playing field and gives you a fairer chance to succeed.”

In her career Anne was also responsible for the global HR function, which encompassed over 160 countries in which Xerox was doing business. Although she never intended to become CEO, she was called to this duty when the company was in a life-threatening crisis at the end of the 90’s.

“I had zero intent to be CEO but I was drafted in a war,” says Anne.
Turning to the impact of the current crisis on Xerox, she reinforces these points:

“The current crisis leads us to refocus on our customers, to cut costs where it is possible and to increase our sales efforts substantially. All sales managers are out there in the market, doubling our efforts to service our clients and help them cut costs too. I still remember the clients that helped us during the crisis in the 90’s and the same will happen in the current crisis”.


Eva Sebok, Mirella Visser, Anne Mulcahy, Pauline van der Meer Mohr and Jeanine van der Vlist.
Find people who want you to succeed

Taking the leadership role in 2001, Anne became responsible for transforming the company; it meant redefining the way Xerox did business and how it was organised. Gradually the company has changed into a networked organisation where innovation has become the key driver. Today, two-thirds of Xerox’s revenues come from the products and services that were introduced to the market place in the last two years; the innovation-time-to-market is the crucial success factor in Xerox’s impressive recovery from the 90’s. Contemplating on her role in the transformation, Anne says, “We survived because people believed we could. Although the focus for the outside world was very much on the financial turnaround, within the company we focused on motivating and energising our people.”

It has taught her that the success of a company depends on its people. “It is about the calibre and quality of your people, their engagement and the alignment with the company’s objectives,” she says.

Inspired by Jim Collins’ book ’Good to Great‘, Anne believes that leadership is, in essence, “creating followership. You need to be able to build great teams. I have always strived to work with people who wanted me to win,” She says.
Attitude to win

Anne recollects her first experiences as sales manager, leading a team of nine tenured men. She had been turned down for managerial roles at least eight times before she was finally appointed. It proved to be a crucial experience.

“I was able to convince seven out of nine team members of my capabilities to achieve success with our team. It made me realise that it is all about your attitude; your attitude to win and your attitude to empathise with your team members,” says Anne.
What about women’s leadership skills?

“Women have natural skills to be successful in the business world, but I don’t believe in skills that are typically feminine or only found in women. Believe me; I am very results-oriented! As a leader you need to be transparent, real and authentic; if you are not yourself, you will not succeed.”

Anne is genuinely proud of the fact that her successor in the leadership role is a woman again—Ursula Burns. Despite some suggestions in the outside world that ‘the women must have plotted’, Anne makes it clear that the CEO succession planning process in Xerox identified a number of potential successors ten years ago; Ursula simply proved to be the best candidate for the job.
What can companies do to promote more women to top positions?

“I am convinced that we not only need women, but diversity in all its forms,” says Anne who expresses reservations with the debate about the alleged improvement of companies’ results when more women are in the top management team (as mentioned in the Catalyst reports). “Women should have an equal opportunity to fail or succeed. I also would not want to see research reports indicating that women more often fail than men. The debate should be about diversity and innovation,” she says.

Faced with the question of whether a target system (a certain number of women appointed to higher positions) will work if it is linked to the reward and remuneration systems of managers, Anne is very clear: “I am not in favour of paying my managers to appoint women; you should not pay people for something they should do normally. She identifies three key factors in companies that are successful in promoting women to higher managerial positions: “First of all, the leader gets it; he or she needs to understand the need – after all the majority of customers in most companies nowadays are women. Secondly, there needs to be consistency and continuity in the direction and policies. Last, you need to create a system of setting expectations and monitoring the results.”
The eternal role model

The round table session was already proof that Anne actively seeks out meetings with senior women leaders in the countries she visits. No surprise for the woman who set up the Xerox professional women’s network at the start of her career. “The objectives of the network were to investigate why women did not progress in the same way men did and how a level playing field could be created in our company,” says Anne. To date, the network plays an important role in the company and the playing field for leadership positions is not equal yet. Anne observes, “Men come to the market more comfortable than women. Self-confidence is still an area of improvement for women.”

One of the very few female CEO’s of public companies, Anne could easily fill her days with speeches, interviews and appearances. She confesses that at the time of the crisis in the 90’s the attention for her as a woman was so overwhelming that she cancelled all of these activities. “It was not good for the company that the attention was always on me instead of the turnaround we were trying to achieve,” she says. However, she received a phone call from another female CEO of a Fortune 500 company, who convinced her that it was her role and duty to continue to speak up and remain accessible as a role model for the next generation women leaders. And this she has been ever since.

VIP Advisory Board member Pauline van der Meer Mohr comment about Anne’s leadership style: ‘ it is inspiring to see how Anne effortlessly demonstrates many qualities traditionally attributed to the finest leaders: a razorsharp mind, humility, strategic insight, inspiring vision and most of all, authenticity. A true icon.’


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