CEO Ursula Burns| Women Talk Comes to the Xerox Family

RedTracker| Ursula Burns hope to redefine the culture of Xerox. Burns is a 30-year veteran at Xerox, and the first woman-to-woman transfer of the CEO position at a major American conglomerate. There’s lots to learn about America’s first African American woman CEO of a Fortune 100 company, reading her NYTimes profile but these sentiments caught our eye.

Ursula Burns wants the folks at Xerox to be not so nice. Mind you, she doesn’t want the animals of Congress roaming her halls. She’s not looking for her version of the New York Stock Exchange. She does want Xerox employees to raise the bar with each other.

“Terminal niceness,” is how she describes an aspect of Xerox’s culture, during her all-hands speech. “We are really, really, really nice.”

Maybe the “Xerox family,” she says, should act a bit more like a real family.

“When we’re in the family, you don’t have to be as nice as when you’re outside of the family,” she says. “I want us to stay civil and kind, but we have to be frank — and the reason we can be frank is because we are all in the same family.” Read On via NYTimes