Ms. Burns joined Xerox in 1980 as a mechanical engi-neer and worked her way to the top, becoming the chairwoman and CEO in 2009. Alongside then CEO and her former boss, Anne Mulcahy, Ms. Burns worked to re-structure Xerox through its transformation and turnaround. She is just one of 21 women who hold the title of an S&P 500 CEO. That's just 4 percent. Xerox Corporation is a $23 billion global enterprise for business process and document management. Ursula Burns's elevation marked two milestones: the first time an African American woman was named CEO of a major American corporation and the first time a woman succeeded another woman in the top job at a company of this size.123 Ms. Burns's story is the quintessential tale of the American Dream. She has defied the odds. She was raised in a housing project on Manhattan's Lower East Side by a hard-working single mother, who cleaned, ironed, did child careanything to see that Ursula and her siblings got a good education. She attended all-girls Catholic High School in New York. She then went on to obtain a BS in mechanical engi-neering from the Polytechnic Institute of NYU in 1980 and a master's in mechanical engineering from Columbia University a year later. Burns describes her mother as a values-driven single mother who believed in the mantra "where you are is not who you are" and who viewed a good education as a way "up and out." Asked to describe her leadership approach, Burns said there are two tenets guiding how she leads the companythe customer and innovation. She went on to describe the culture at Xerox as extremely collaborative. "We try to make people win. We try to have winners in the organization, versus winners and losers. We try to have parity in the organization so that we can get the best out of the group." She encour-ages participation in decision making and frowns on compart-mentalization, where people mostly think along functional or departmental lines. She advises her managers to check at the door their functional affiliation as the primary thought pro-cess by which they give her input. She is team-oriented and wants everyone to focus on the customer, competitors, em-ployees, and shareholders. Burns preaches a "can do" attitude. She describes Xerox's culture in one word"possibility." "We actually believe that there's not a challenge that we cannot un-dertake. When there's a big challenge or a huge opportunity, we have a culture that says, yes, let's go after it." It is obvious that Ms. Burns is not comfortable being in the spotlight or getting all the recognition and praise that the me-dia and others have heaped on her since being named to the top job at Xerox. "The accolades that I get for doing absolutely nothing are amazingI've been named to every list, literally, since I became the CEO," Ms. Burns says. "In the first 30 days, I was named to a list of the most impressive XYZ.The accolades are good for five minutes, but then it takes kind of a shine off the real story. The real story is not Ursula Burns. I just happen to be the person standing up at this point representing Xerox." Ms. Burns is emphatic on the values that she wants Xerox employees to espouse. Describing how Xerox goes about in the conduct of its business with stakeholders, Burns said they put a huge premium on "means." As she puts it, "Are we contributing or taking away? If you have the wrong means, you can probably knock the ball out of the park for a while, but you wouldn't be able to do it in a sustainable way." In talking about the problems that have plagued Xerox in the recent past, Ms. Burns said that there was a disconnect be-tween formulated strategies and implementation. "We had no way to screen through what capability our organization had to do some of the things we wanted to do. You can't just wish it and expect it to come out without enabling." There was a sense that Xerox had become bureaucratic and less responsive to changing circumstances. She had to redefine core concepts like collaboration and teamwork that had assumed a negative context among her followers. "Teamwork doesn't mean every-body agrees 100 percent," she said. She advocated teamwork and fearlessness as tools to implement decisions with agility and to take corrective action when necessary. Ms. Burns does not believe leading and managing are syn-onymous. As she puts it, "lead" does not mean "manage." She describes the early years with Anne Mulcahy (her predeces-sor) as the "bunker" years. "During the bunker days, for both Anne and me, and probably the top ten people of the com-pany, 80 percent of what we did was managing." Now, under her tenure, it's totally switched, with 20 percent managing and 80 percent leading, because the company has been stabilized. This is a clear illustration of the distinction we drew in the text between leadership and management and also between trans-formational and transactional leadership. Managers maintain the status quo and leaders bring about change through their vision. Transformational leaders lead, and transactional leaders manage. There is no doubt that Ursula Burns sees her role as that of vision setter for Xerox. Asked if there has been any change in Xerox's purpose, vision, and values in recent years, Burns said she has had to change the purpose and vision in the in-termediate term but not the values. She believes that vision formulation should be an ongoing exercise because of the changing business environment. When one purpose and vision is fulfilled, there is an urgent need for the leader to usher in a new vision; else, as she puts it, "People look up and say, now what? If you don't define it clearly, then people actually make up their own. Then you can forget it. Then you just stagnate." About accomplishments that have taken place since Burns became CEO, such as major product announcements, launches of new businesses, acquisitions, and major operational efficien-cies, she said they are all the "collective accomplishments of Team Xerox." According to the Wall Street Journal, the corner-stone of Ms. Burns's strategy, which she dubbed Xerox 2010, was the acquisition of Dallas-based service company Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) for $6.4 billion. The service sector of Xerox is now bringing in nearly half of the company's total revenue. Recently, Lynn Blodgett, former CEO of ACS who's now president of Xerox Services, remarked on the terrific job Ms. Burns had done in getting the right level of integration and at the same time preserving the entrepreneurial spirit that made ACS such a great company. This is important because many analysts and investors had criticized her for taking this action. They said it was the wrong move because it was too costly in the midst of a recession and too largeACS had 74,000 employees compared to Xerox's 54,000 at the time. Asked to defined great leadership in a sentence or two, she said it is about persons who can define a purpose, select a great team, empower that team appropriately, enable them to understand what greatness is about, and then let them go.

Questions

1. In your opinion is Ursula Burns more of a charismatic, transformational, or transactional leader? Or is she all of these leadership types?

2. identifies transformational and charismatic leader behaviors. In your opinion, which of the behav-ioral components does Ms. Burns exemplify?

3. A key attribute of servant leadership is that it transcends self-interest to serve the needs of others. Does Ursula Burns fit this bill?

4. identifies the qualities of charismatic and transformational leaders. Based on your knowledge of Ms. Burns, which of the ten qualities can you directly attribute to her?

5. What is the evidence that Ms. Burns employed the transformation process described and outline in the text?

6. According to the leadership continuum model of Tannenbaum and Schmidt, where would you put Ursula Burns based on the facts of the case?

7. Communication is a major competency for leaders. Would you agree that this is a quality that Burns likely possesses, to have been as effective as she has been so far?

8. One of the characteristics of effective teams is the pres-ence of a capable and competent team leader . describes different activities of the team leader in creating an effective team, including turning obstacles into opportuni-ties. Would you describe Ursula Burns as an effective team leader?