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absolutely nothing are amazing—I’ve been named to every list, literally, since I became CEO,” she told the paper shortly after her promotion.
S DIVERSITY & THE BAR® NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2013
SO WHY WOULD the Minority Corporate Counsel Association, dedicated to diversifying the legal profession, present its Lifetime Achievement Award to the 55-year-old Xerox mechanical engineer-turned-CEO ? Is it because she’s the fi rst African American woman
named CEO of a major global corporation? Or perhaps because she’s the fi rst woman to succeed another woman in the top executive job at a company of its size? Or could her award be about something else, something she represents?
THE FOUNDATION Burns was raised in the Baruch Houses, a New York City housing project, by her single Panamanian immigrant mother. “I grew up in a neighborhood that was black and Hispanic, or very, very poor white,” Burns says. “T e schools were marginal at best, and if you wanted to go to a better-than-marginal school, you had to save up some money and fi gure out a way to get your kid there. My
mother did that for us.” Burns graduated from all-girls Cathedral High School
in Manhattan and went on to earn a bachelor of science in mechanical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in 1980. T e following year she received a master of science in mechanical engineering from Columbia University. Her mother’s infl uence is a consistent theme throughout
her life. It was only when Burns was a teenager that she began to appreciate how exceptional her mother was. “As I got older, I realized that this woman was an amazing rocket scientist. She had a plan, and she implemented it, and she didn’t waver far from it. Her mission was her kids, and her plan was to make us successful.” Success never meant earning lots of money in her
household. Her mother’s mantra was “you have to leave behind more than you take away.” It is the credo that drives Burns every day.
MCCA.COM
peaking to the New York Times in 2010, Xerox CEO Ursula Burns lamented the constant awards she receives. “The accolades that I get for doing
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