Key Facts: Ursula M. Burns (born September 20, 1958, in the Baruch Houses on New York's Lower East Side, raised by a single mother) interned at Xerox as a mechanical engineering student in the summer of 1980, then joined full time in 1981 after a 1980 undergraduate degree from Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute and a 1981 master's from Columbia University. She became CEO on July 1, 2009, succeeding Anne Mulcahy in what Fortune called the first woman-to-woman CEO handoff in Fortune 500 history, and the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. Xerox reported $15.2 billion in total revenue for 2009, the year she took the job. Three months in, she announced the $6.4 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services on September 28, 2009, a deal she said would create "a $22 billion enterprise with $17 billion in recurring revenue," closing February 8, 2010. Xerox did reach $22.6 billion in revenue by 2011. On January 29, 2016, she announced a split instead of running the company whole, and when the separation of Conduent completed on December 31, 2016, the standalone Xerox she handed off reported roughly $10.8 billion in revenue, smaller than the company she had inherited seven years earlier, before spending a dollar acquiring anything. She stepped down as CEO at the split and remained chairman until May 2017. Her memoir, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are (2021), covers all of it.

The Structural Correction Doctrine

The Structural Correction Doctrine is Burns's operating premise that a business in structural decline needs a structural fix, not a motivational one, and that if the fix does not work, the honest move is to reverse it rather than defend it. She treated Xerox's shrinking printing and copier business as an arithmetic problem, not a morale problem: the addressable market for standalone hardware was contracting, so she spent $6.4 billion acquiring a services company nearly the size of Xerox itself. When the combined company still could not outrun that decline, she did not spend her remaining years defending the acquisition or promising synergies were still coming. She split the company in two, in effect admitting the fix she had built her tenure around had not solved the problem it was bought to solve. It is a leadership model built for running decline honestly, not for producing growth.

Ursula Burns is usually introduced with her origin story: the Lower East Side housing projects, a single mother who insisted on Catholic school and violin lessons on a domestic worker's income, a summer internship that turned into a 29-year climb to the top of a Fortune 500 company. All of it is true, and none of it is why her Xerox tenure is worth studying. What makes Burns instructive is what she did with the job once she had it. She inherited a company whose core product was structurally losing ground to digital substitution, and rather than manage that decline quietly, she made two enormous, opposite bets: first to buy her way out of the problem, then, years later, to admit the purchase had not solved it and split the company instead.

That is a different case study than the rescue narratives that dominate leadership writing. Lou Gerstner kept a bleeding IBM whole, betting integration was the moat worth defending. Ginni Rometty inherited that same integrated IBM two CEOs later and spent eight years trying to out-transform a market moving faster than she was. Burns's problem looked similar on paper, but her answer ran the opposite direction from Gerstner's: where he bet on staying whole, she bet Xerox needed to become something structurally different, and when that did not fully work either, she bet again by taking the company apart. Angela Ahrendts pulled a comparable-looking company, a legacy brand losing relevance, out of decline with the opposite lever: image and brand equity, not balance-sheet restructuring. Printers had a category problem, not a brand problem, and no rebrand fixes a shrinking category.

The numbers tell the honest version better than any adjective could. Xerox reported $15.2 billion in revenue the year Burns became CEO. She spent $6.4 billion acquiring Affiliated Computer Services (ACS) on the promise of building a $22 billion giant, and for a few years the arithmetic worked: revenue hit $22.6 billion in 2011. But the printing business kept shrinking underneath the services layer she had bought, and by the time she split the company at the end of 2016, the Xerox she handed off reported about $10.8 billion in revenue, smaller than the company she had inherited seven years earlier, before the acquisition.

This page will not pretend that arithmetic is a triumph. Its argument is that running decline honestly, making a genuinely large bet, watching it fail to fully solve the problem, and reversing course in public rather than holding the position, is its own leadership skill, one that gets far less attention than growth-story leadership. Burns also inherited the canonical case study in disruptive innovation: Xerox's own Palo Alto Research Center invented the graphical user interface, the computer mouse, and Ethernet decades before Burns ran the company, then famously failed to build a business around any of it. Steve Jobs later said Xerox "could have owned the entire computer industry, could have been the IBM of the nineties, could have been the Microsoft of the nineties." Clayton Christensen built much of his disruption theory on exactly that pattern. Burns inherited its consequence: a hardware company that had already missed one reinvention and now needed a second way out.

Leadership Style Breakdown

Style	Weight	How it showed up
Structural Operator	55%	Treated Xerox's shrinking core as a portfolio problem to solve with large, balance-sheet-level moves, not culture campaigns. The $6.4 billion ACS acquisition bought scale in services. The 2016 split reversed course when the combined entity still could not outrun hardware decline. Both moves were built at the level of what the company owned, not how it felt about itself.
Blunt, Unfiltered Communicator	30%	Known for direct, sometimes uncomfortable honesty about performance and about herself. She said publicly that "there were lots of reasons for Xerox not to acquire ACS" even while pushing the deal through, and people who worked closely with her, including Anne Mulcahy, describe someone who tells the truth "in ugly times" rather than managing the message.
Institution and Access Builder	15%	Beyond the balance sheet, Burns built structures meant to outlast her tenure: chairing the White House National STEM program under President Obama from 2009 to 2016, sitting on boards from American Express to TSMC, and advocating publicly for more people who look like her in rooms she says were "designed and perfected around a white male ideal."

The 55/30/15 split matters because the second trait made the first one survivable. A CEO who reverses her own signature acquisition needs enough credibility for bluntness that the reversal reads as honesty, not panic. Burns had spent years building a reputation for saying the uncomfortable thing out loud, which is part of why the 2016 split registered as a correction instead of a collapse.

Key Leadership Traits

Trait	Rating	What it means in practice
Willingness to make one very large, hard-to-reverse bet	Very High	Spending $6.4 billion, roughly 40 percent of Xerox's own annual revenue, on a single acquisition three months into the job is not a hedge. It is a full commitment of the balance sheet to one thesis about where the business needed to go.
Financial candor under pressure	High	Burns did not hide behind adjusted metrics or vague transformation language when growth stalled. The decision to split rather than keep promising synergy was, in effect, a public admission the thesis behind the acquisition had not fully played out.
Tolerance for public reversal	Very High	The standout trait on this page. Most executives who make a defining bet spend the rest of their tenure defending it. Burns spent six years building the case for services, then unwound that exact structure in public, under her own name, a discipline Mary Barra showed differently in letting GM's ignition-switch failures be investigated in full public view.
Directness bordering on abrasiveness	High	The same bluntness that built her credibility also drew real criticism, including coverage that framed her among what one outlet called the "least liked CEOs in America," a reputation she has addressed directly rather than softened.
Building access ladders behind her	Strong	From the STEM program to her later board seats at TSMC, Endeavor Group Holdings, and IHS Holding, Burns treated institutional access as something to actively build and hand forward, not a side effect of a successful career.

The 3 Decisions That Defined Ursula Burns as a Leader

Burns's structural correction approach took shape through an acquisition, a governance negotiation, and a separation.

Ursula Burns separating two business portfolios while directors review the structural decision.

1. Buying $6.4 Billion of Services to Escape a Shrinking Hardware Business (2009 to 2010)

Three months after becoming CEO, Burns announced Xerox would acquire Affiliated Computer Services for $6.4 billion in cash and stock, a $63.11-per-share deal that closed on February 8, 2010. ACS was a business process outsourcing company nearly the size of Xerox itself, running back-office and IT operations for large enterprises and government agencies. The logic answered a hard problem directly: printing was structurally declining as offices went digital, so Xerox needed a second, growing revenue base built on the same enterprise relationships. In her own words at the announcement, the deal would build "a new class of solution provider" and turn Xerox into a $22 billion enterprise with $17 billion of recurring revenue.

This is a diversification strategy executed at maximum size rather than through smaller, safer bets. It was not an easy call internally: she has said plainly that "there were lots of reasons for Xerox not to acquire ACS," and employee sentiment toward the deal was reportedly cool. She pushed it through anyway, betting near-term stability on where she believed long-term revenue needed to come from.

For you: a genuinely large structural bet is not judged by whether it feels comfortable to announce. It is judged by whether the arithmetic behind it still holds up years later. Burns's bet held up for a few years and then stopped, which does not make it the wrong call to have made. It makes the willingness to revisit it, rather than defend it forever, the more important trait to study.

2. Negotiating With Carl Icahn Instead of Fighting Him (January 2016)

By early 2016, activist investor Carl Icahn had built a stake in Xerox and was publicly pushing for it to separate document technology from services, the same idea Burns was already moving toward. Rather than absorb a prolonged proxy fight, Burns reached an agreement with Icahn giving his camp three of nine board seats on the new business process outsourcing company and a voice in its CEO search, while Xerox's own board kept control of executing the separation. She framed it as governance: the deal would "ensure that we will have strong leadership and best-in-class governance for the new Business Process Outsourcing company."

The decision reflected a pragmatic read of leverage. Icahn wanted the split, Burns had already concluded the split made sense, and the real disagreement was over control of the new entity, not the underlying strategy. Settling that narrower point quickly let her spend 2016 executing the separation instead of fighting over a plan both sides already agreed on.

What this shows: when an activist's demand overlaps with a conclusion you already reached, the fight worth avoiding is over credit or control, not the underlying idea. Burns conceded board seats on a business she was about to give up anyway, in exchange for a clear runway to execute her own plan.

3. Splitting Xerox in Two and Stepping Down Rather Than Running the Smaller Company (2016)

Burns could have kept the CEO title and run the smaller, standalone Xerox Document Technology company. Instead, she became chairman of the Document Technology board in May 2016 and handed the CEO role to Jeff Jacobson, an internal executive, once the separation formally completed on December 31, 2016. The closest parallel is Meg Whitman's split of Hewlett-Packard into two companies on November 1, 2015, months before Burns announced Xerox's own separation: another legacy technology giant concluding its hardware and growth businesses needed separate public markets. Conduent, built around the old ACS operations, launched independently with about $6.7 billion in annual revenue under an external CEO, Ashok Vemuri, brought in because the new company needed leadership from outside Xerox's own culture. Burns stayed on as chairman only until May 2017, then left entirely.

The choice not to stay on as CEO says something real about how she saw her own role. Having spent her tenure building and then dismantling one structural thesis, she did not try to prove a second one running Xerox at $10.8 billion in revenue. She handed that job to someone else, eventually taking the CEO role at VEON in December 2018. The aftermath was not smooth: Jacobson himself resigned in May 2018 after a second Icahn-backed fight over a proposed Fujifilm merger, a reminder that a split does not by itself buy an organization lasting stability.

For you: recognize when you have completed the specific job you were positioned to do. Burns's mandate was making and then correcting the big structural call, not running the resulting smaller entity indefinitely. Handing that next chapter to someone else, rather than assuming the person who diagnosed the problem is also the right person to fix it, is its own form of honest self-assessment.

What Ursula Burns Would Do in Your Role

If you're a CEO running a business with a structurally shrinking core product, Burns's playbook puts the fix at the level of what the company owns and sells, not at the level of messaging. She did not ask Xerox's printer division to try harder. She spent $6.4 billion changing what fraction of revenue came from printers at all. Ask whether your response changes the business's structure or just changes how you talk about it.

Ursula Burns coaching an operator through evidence of declining business performance.

If you're a board member facing an activist investor, the ACS-to-Conduent story is really two decisions, and the useful lesson is the smaller one. Burns's negotiation with Icahn worked because she separated the point she actually disagreed on, board seats and search control, from the point she had already decided herself, that a split made sense. Boards under activist pressure often litigate the whole relationship at once; isolating the real disagreement gets you to resolution faster.

If you're an operator watching a big bet underperform, the six years between the ACS acquisition and the split is worth sitting with. Burns did not reverse course the moment growth slowed. She gave the thesis real time, watched the decline outpace it anyway, and only then made the harder call. The lesson is not "commit forever" or "quit fast." A structural bet deserves a structural amount of patience, bounded by evidence.

Situation you're facing	Burns's likely move
A core product line is structurally losing relevance	Make one large, well-capitalized bet on a genuinely different revenue base, not a token diversification move
An activist investor wants a change you already believe in	Concede control of the parts you were not attached to, in exchange for keeping ownership of execution and timeline
A signature acquisition is not delivering promised synergy years later	Give it real time bounded by evidence, then reverse it in public rather than defend it indefinitely
A business you built needs leadership for its next chapter	Bring in outside leadership when that chapter needs a different skill set than the one that got you here
Your team or the press is openly critical of your style	Address the criticism directly in your own words rather than softening your approach

Notable Quotes & Lessons Beyond the Boardroom

At the ACS announcement in September 2009, Burns described the logic in her own words: "By combining Xerox's strengths in document technology with ACS's expertise in managing and automating work processes, we're creating a new class of solution provider." Worth rereading years later, since that "new class of solution provider" is the exact structure she later took apart.

On the deal's internal reception, she has been unusually candid, acknowledging plainly that "there were lots of reasons for Xerox not to acquire ACS." On decision speed, she has said: "We're going to make mistakes. We just try to make mistakes where you can make them fast, so you're not five years into the damn thing and realize, 'Oh my God, that was a bad move.'" That standard, and the six years it took her to apply it to her own biggest decision, is worth returning to below.

Anne Mulcahy, the mentor who handed Burns the CEO role in 2009, is often quoted describing what she valued most in Burns: her courage to tell people the truth "in ugly times." Reflecting on race and corporate structures in a 2021 interview timed to her memoir, Burns said the barriers she has navigated exist because "the fact of the world, particularly the structures in the world, has been designed and perfected around a white male ideal." Asked why she was still expected to explain other people's discomfort, she pushed back: "Can we just move on to why are there not more people like me?" And on simply getting on with things: "We're all going to die, so we should all live." Her memoir, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are (2021), takes its title from the same idea: circumstances of birth describe a starting point, not an identity.

Where This Style Breaks

The Structural Correction Doctrine has a real failure mode, visible in Xerox's own numbers rather than in anything Burns did wrong procedurally. She promised a $22 billion enterprise with $17 billion in recurring revenue, and for a moment, in 2011, the top line matched the promise at $22.6 billion. But hardware kept shrinking underneath that figure, and by 2016 the honest picture, roughly $10.8 billion in continuing Xerox revenue plus $6.7 billion in Conduent revenue at launch, sat well below the $22 billion the deal was pitched on. The fix did not fail because it was poorly conceived. It failed because the market's pace outran the multi-year integration timeline any acquisition that size requires, the same trap that later caught Ginni Rometty's slower-moving IBM transformation. A $6.4 billion acquisition buys a new business. It does not buy back pricing power a category has already lost. Carlos Slim built his fortune on the opposite dynamic: buying into Telmex in 1990 and defending decades of pricing power Burns never had.

Ursula Burns examining an eroding core-business foundation beneath a new revenue unit.

There is also a real tension between Burns's stated philosophy and her biggest decision. She has said the goal is failing fast, "so you're not five years into the damn thing," yet the ACS-to-Conduent arc ran essentially her full tenure before she reversed it. That is not quite a contradiction, since a $6.4 billion acquisition cannot be unwound on the timeline of a failed product launch. But her own standard for speed was not the standard she applied to the decision that defined her tenure, and a leader adopting this doctrine should be honest that "structural" and "fast" pull in opposite directions.

The bluntness that built Burns's credibility also had real costs. Coverage of her tenure at times framed her explicitly among the least popular CEOs in corporate America, tied partly to the ACS deal's rocky internal reception. Nor did the split buy Xerox lasting calm: Jeff Jacobson, the CEO she chose for Document Technology, resigned within eighteen months amid a second Icahn-backed fight over a proposed Fujifilm merger. Splitting a company answers how it is structured, not who should run each piece or for how long, and that post-Burns turbulence is the honest coda to a tenure otherwise defined by decisive correction.

Learn More

Frequently Asked Questions about Ursula Burns' Leadership

Who is Ursula Burns?

Ursula M. Burns (born September 20, 1958) is a former CEO and chairman of Xerox who served as chief executive from July 2009 to December 2016 and chairman until May 2017. She was the first Black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company and succeeded Anne Mulcahy in what Fortune called the first woman-to-woman CEO handoff in Fortune 500 history. She later chaired, then led as CEO, the telecommunications group VEON from 2017 to 2020.

What was Ursula Burns's biggest decision as Xerox CEO?

Her defining decision was the $6.4 billion acquisition of Affiliated Computer Services, announced in September 2009 and closed in February 2010, meant to diversify Xerox from printing into managed services. The decision that turned it into a two-part story was splitting Xerox into two companies, Xerox and Conduent, in 2016, when the combined entity still could not outrun hardware decline.

Did the ACS acquisition work?

Partially and temporarily. Xerox's revenue reached $22.6 billion in 2011, close to the $22 billion Burns projected. But the underlying hardware business kept declining, and by the time Xerox split in two at the end of 2016, the standalone Xerox reported about $10.8 billion in revenue, smaller than the $15.2 billion Xerox reported the year Burns became CEO, before the acquisition.

Why did Xerox split into Xerox and Conduent?

By 2016, Xerox's combined document technology and business process outsourcing operations were not delivering the growth the 2009 ACS acquisition had promised, and activist investor Carl Icahn was separately pushing for a breakup. Burns negotiated governance terms with Icahn and executed a separation that closed on December 31, 2016, creating standalone Xerox (document technology) and Conduent (business process services, launched with about $6.7 billion in revenue).

What happened to Ursula Burns after leaving Xerox?

She joined the board of VEON in 2017, became executive chairwoman in March 2018, and served as CEO from December 2018 to February 2020. She has also served on the boards of American Express, Nestle, and ExxonMobil, and sits today on TSMC, Endeavor Group Holdings, and IHS Holding. Her memoir, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are, was published in 2021.

What can leaders learn from Ursula Burns's leadership style?

Three things. First, structural decline needs a structural fix sized to match the problem, not incremental adjustments. Second, when an activist's demand overlaps with a conclusion you already reached, concede the parts you were not attached to in exchange for control of execution. Third, if a defining bet does not fully deliver years later, reversing it in public beats defending it indefinitely.

About the author

Victor Hoang

Co-Founder, Rework.com

Victor Hoang is Co-Founder and CMO of Rework. He spent 12+ years scaling B2B SaaS growth, building a lead engine that generated over 1 million leads and $10M+ in annual recurring revenue. Today he builds AI agents and MCP servers into Rework's products to empower customers across growth and operations. He writes about what actually works.

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