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URSULA BURNS AS A HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT (LEFT) AND AS A YOUNG ADULT VISITING SAN FRANCISCO.
“Her big focus was on raising us to strive for the next big
thing. And even if we don’t get it for ourselves, we should enable it for other people,” Burns explains.
UPWARD OPPORTUNITIES Burns started at Xerox, known for selling printers at the time, the year she graduated from college as a summer intern. For the next decade, she worked on product devel- opment and planning. In January 1989 she attended a work-life discussion moderated by Wayland Hicks, a senior executive in charge of all customer operations. Hicks responded to a poorly worded question about
lowering standards for diverse workers in a professional, appropriate manner. Burns, who was 31 at the time, was shocked he acknowledged the question, let alone answered it. She was called into his office after the meeting. “I go see him, and we started a relationship from that day that I still have with him. I mean he’s so different
DIVERSITY & THE BAR® NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013
than I am,” she remembers. “Everything: He’s from the Midwest; a white man; really conservative; had traditional parents; politically conservative. I’m a New York City girl, black. And he’s marketing and sales; I’m engineering. Everything different that you can imagine. He taught me how to debate and still like people who you are very dif- ferent from. Like and respect and learn from people that you’re very different from.” Burns became executive assistant to Hicks. Nine months later Hicks told her that Xerox’s CEO Paul
Allaire wanted to talk to her. She was hesitant because she recently married her coworker Lloyd Bean and was afraid of being transferred away from her husband. Allaire wanted her to become his executive assistant. Burns was reluctant, but he told her, “’I’m the CEO, and
I am asking you to do it. And it’s probably a good idea if the CEO asks you to do something to do it,’” she recalls. She did not realize it at the time, but accepting the position put
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