ECNY Events - Ursula Burns

Yeah, my mother. I'm one of these typical immigrant, poor immigrant black kids. My mother came over from Panama. She was a single mom. She wasn't single when she came, but by the time she landed here and got settled, my father had exited stage left. She had a high school diploma, pretty standard. Literally poverty-stricken immigrant. We lived in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and she had one set of assets in the world, and she made that clear to us. She had one set of assets, and it was my brother, my sister, and I. And her job was to make sure that we became assets to the world, positive message to the world. So she would come up with all these crazy statements, which when I was living through them, all you could do is tune them out and say, 'This is like, do I have to hear this again?' You know, one of them was, 'God doesn't like ugly.' She would just say that continuously. She would say, 'The world doesn't happen to you; you have to happen to the world.' She said, 'Where you are is not who you are, and remember that when you're rich and famous.' Now for my mother to say, 'And remember that when you're rich and famous,' is such a bizarre thing because this was before the internet, before anybody knew about rich and famous. I mean, how do we know about rich and famous? And she had absolutely no idea that I would be sitting here. Actually, it wasn't even — I had no idea I'd be sitting here. So I know she didn't have any idea that I'd be sitting here. So when I started working and moving through corporate life and social life in general, I realized that there were always these options I had to kind of give in to, to trade the card, to become like — to conform, to take shortcuts, or whatever. And this statement was in the back of my head all the time: that you have to make sure you understand who you are, and who you are doesn't change because you became — because you're poor — and who you are just definitely doesn't change when you become rich and famous. So I've navigated my life around this thing, around this whole statement of, 'Remember.'

I had the greatest teachers in this. I kind of knew how to stand out without trying because I didn't look like anyone else. As you can tell, I've kind of done the best that I can at my New York City accent. And you're wearing all black. Yeah, this is the color — this is what people tell me is the color of my skin. I'm all black. I'm a girl. I was poor. All these things that I knew I was. But anyway, standing up, being different wasn't really that hard. Not that I was trying to be; it's just that people identifying you as one. The other difference by the way was I was an engineer. I studied undergraduate and graduate degrees in engineering, and I actually worked as an engineer in a place. So I was just very odd. What was hard for me was actually that there's a point where that difference becomes a massive inhibitor because that difference actually is rigidity around learning new approaches and learning new things. So I had to step back, and I had a lot of help. My husband was great help. My husband was 20 years older than I am. He passed away in 2019, way before COVID started, which is good. And he was an engineer at the company, a scientist at the company. He had 84 patents at Xerox. Amazing guy. And he would always tell me that basically, 'You're way out there; you got to kind of come closer to where everybody else is. I know that you're a black woman and I have this massive afro and everything about me was like, just look at me, I'm different. Physically, but also in the approach to things.' And he said, 'You just gotta close the gap a little bit because people can't — halfway is not even close enough.' The other person who was really good at this was Vernon. Vernon Jordan, a very good friend of mine, a very good friend of Mr. Hochberg's here. He was just an amazing mentor and guide for me. He would call me on everything. If I went to a meeting, dressed at a board meeting inappropriately — I was a young engineer presenting at the board all the time — he would write me a note and say, 'Let's talk after,' which was always in the beginning. I was like, 'Oh, this is gonna be fun. Let's talk after.' I remember one day he told me, for example, after, he says, 'You know, you have to wear hose.' What? By the way, he was wrong. But always watching to see whether or not I could close this gap between where I was and where people were enough — don't lose my soul and who I am — and close the gap. But he called me on everything: how I dressed, how I spoke, whether I was respectful. He was just an amazing guy. So I had a lot of people who were rotating around me who helped to have me fit in a little bit more because, like I said, being outside was pretty normal. So I knew how to do that.

Yeah, I think more engineers should be CEOs, by the way, and we would have probably more — yeah, more logical thought. I became an engineer. How did I become an engineer? Because I was good at math. That's literally the entire association. I went to an all-girl Catholic high school here, Cathedral High School on 56th Street and First. And I went to parochial grade school. We were poor and the school was okay. Cathedral turned out to be great, but it was very narrow. My classes were belief in Jesus. I had a class called marriage. I did not have a class called calculus. But I didn't need calculus. I had a class called belief in Jesus and marriage because it was not about only what they taught us; the way that they taught us was to learn how to study and read, to learn how to write, to just learn how to articulate, debate. So it was a great place. And I took the normal things that you take. You go to a guidance counselor, which were all nuns, and they said, 'Three choices you have here. You could become a nun, you could become a — I know this is not a lie — a nun, a teacher, or a nurse.' Those were the options. This was 1970. Nun was absolutely off the table. I had flown all of the pre-nun courses; I definitely didn't do that. Nurse was not on the table either, even though I kind of liked the idea of medicine and being a doctor. And teaching was an option. It was an option. I said, 'This is a place I could probably go.' And I looked in the Barron's book, and they told me what a teacher made every year. And I said there's no way I could do that. I mean, literally, my family — my mother was poor as hell. And the number one thing I was going to do was get her out of where she was, and I wouldn't be able to do that being a teacher. So in that same book was the number one highest paying degree after four years of college: civil engineering, and also chemical engineering. So I said, 'I'm going to be a chemical engineer, period, end of discussion.' Had no clue what the hell a chemical engineer did, what you had to study to become one. Sounded really great. I looked at all the schools that do chemical engineering, and I went back to my high school and said, 'Okay, I'm going to become a chemical engineer, and here are the schools that I'm going to apply to.' It was the most competitive schools. You know how the Barron's book lays it out? Those were the eight I was going to apply. I actually applied to 11. Most of them — I actually ended up getting into all but two — all on this one program called the Higher Education Opportunity Program, which means that you had potential but you hadn't taken any of the precursor classes, so they stuff you in these things over the summer to catch you up. Anyway, long story short, I didn't like chemical engineering. I loved mechanics and mechanical engineering. Became a mechanical engineer, studied mechanical engineering, and literally loved it. I actually liked what I studied and wanted to do it, to actually practice it. And I went to Xerox. I worked at other places in the summers before that last summer. I worked at Xerox. They told me to get my master's degree. I got my master's degree at Columbia, going to work for them. And for the first six or seven years, I was an engineer in the lab, working on very specific problems. Loved it, it was great. But it was really my husband who told me it was kind of like only one portion of the company, and I knew nothing about the company. I had absolutely no idea what the heck we were doing out there, who we were selling to, how we made money, who the leadership of the company was. That was during a time when you couldn't Google who the CEO was. You had to go to an annual report and look up the leadership team. There's no way to really tell them. We didn't have computers. It was just a strange, different time. It was the last century. Literally the last century. Not quite that school was around then, yeah, right up the street. And then we graduated at St. Patrick's Cathedral. So in looking at that, would talk to us even though we're in New York, it's a financial capital, but the whole idea of manufacturing America — you're at the intersection of technology, tech company, manufacturing company. And I did it in the right order, I think. I actually found something I really loved by accident, however I got there. Did it for a while. So I understood what it takes to do it. So I knew a lot about the inner workings of the company. Didn't have any thought about running the place or even understood that kind of a structure. And stayed in that world for four or five years and then got plucked out, primarily because I was vocal about things. About the way things were not — like how our labs were organized or staffed, for example, how few women we had, how few black people we had. This is well before — this is when we still call things affirmative action. We didn't call it diversity, equity, inclusion; we called it affirmative action. So I was fairly outspoken in these areas, and that different ability to speak out got me on the radar of some executives at Xerox. I had no clue who they were, and they were black white guys and they were all from the Midwest. So I was dedicated to stay in engineering because I was really good at it, and I had kind of made my name, and I liked it a lot. And this one guy pulled me and said, 'You should learn more about the company.' My husband said that too, but he wasn't my husband. I was flirting with him, so you know, didn't take any of his advice; I just kind of was flirting with him. This other guy — you don't do that anymore, you don't flirt anymore. Well, that was co-employees. Thank God I lived back then. I don't think I went through that back then. Anyway, he told me to come up and kind of talk to him. We got into a big argument in a big meeting. He asked a question — somebody asked a question about why we're hiring all these women and these black people. Literally, that was the question: 'Why are we hiring all these women and black people?' Because he thinks it's lowering the standard of the company, this individual, in this very large meeting. And the person who answered the question was a guy named Waylon Hicks. And Waylon answered it really nicely. And then I raised my hand. It's really interesting, I learned early: if you're the only black person or black woman in the room and you raise your hand, guess what? They generally call on you. All you have to do is raise your hand. And it's really interesting that you can see who you are because you don't look like everybody else. Raise my hand, Waylon called on me, and I said, 'You know, I am absolutely insulted that you answered this question.' And I really lit into him without thinking too much about what I was doing. And he answered my question respectfully and then said, 'I'd like you to come and see me.' Literally, not in front of a thousand people, 'I'd like you to come and see me next week.' And my husband — who wasn't my husband — said, 'The worst that can happen is you're gonna have to find a new job. So there's this.' The great news was that this guy took an interest in me, and he said, 'You did the right thing, but you said it the wrong way. And you're gonna have to learn, as you go through your career, how to say things in a way that people listen to you.' That was another lesson that was amazing because you don't want people to put up defenses — not on the content. The content is what you want the focus to be on. So being an engineer was really interesting because most of the people became — they were marketing guys or finance guys, a lot of legal guys running the company. And when you walk into a room and you don't actually know anything about the law and you're not that interested in the finances, but you're interested in the way the company works or what they make to make money, you come with a completely different point of view. And it was always fun and interesting. Still to this day, there are very few engineers who run companies. There should be more. Noted.

Yeah, that's a big deal right now. It turns out when I write about this in a book, and Fred and I worked together for a couple of years because I was the vice chair and then the chair of the Export Council, he was the head of the Exim Bank. That's an action banking. We never got as much money as we should have from the Exim Bank, but you know, he was a good partner nonetheless. And one of the discussions that was swirling around back then — and even before, but back then and now — is this idea that we should make more things here. And I always said, 'Where is here exactly? Is here where we sell our stuff? Because if that's the case, we should probably make it everywhere in the world. Is here where we earn most of our profits or generate most of our revenues? That should be around the world as well. So this idea of here is a narrow perspective on what a business does. We have a huge amount of affinity and leaning towards the shore that we're incorporated in, but we make — Xerox when I left, we made as much money outside of the United States as we did in profitability. Revenue for sure more outside the United States. Profitability probably about break-even. So there's no way for me to actually go to Paris and say, 'By the way, I'm going to sell you my digital printing machines, and none of them are made in France. They're all made back in the United States. Just give me your money and I'll send it all to the US.' So I think there's one problem: global companies are actual global citizens and have to actually operate on a global basis. That's one. Other one is that it doesn't make sense financially to do it that way. I mean, literally, there are better sources of X or Y or Z in other places in the world, and so you should go to those places to get the best source. What has happened a lot lately is that we've actually disconnected profitability and a whole bunch of other financial metrics from where you're shored. And that we definitely have to fix this because it doesn't make sense if you make all of your money in XYZ and you have a way to pay taxes to none of the people — which thoroughly really happens — that you pay taxes to none of the people, but you actually pay low taxes to the place that you have the biggest presence. And that's a big challenge. Like Apple's music business is headquartered in Luxembourg, last I checked. There are not a lot of great Luxembourgish musicians, songwriters, and recording artists living in Luxembourg. And Xerox, for a while when I was running manufacturing, one of the things that we did along with everyone else is we moved some of our factories to Ireland because Ireland had given most manufacturing companies a tax holiday. I mean, how many machines could we actually sell in Ireland? Not very many. So this kind of playing of the game, I do understand, and I mean, it's not breaking the law, but it is not easy to explain. And we have to be better at explaining it if this is what we're going to do, or stop doing it.

I'm on five boards, by the way, but I liked the sound of three better, so could you keep saying it? I picked that up from CNBC. Can't rely on that. CNBC, no, you can't lie on any of that stuff anymore. You know, DEI is one of these things that, depending on the mood I am in the morning, I want to talk about it or don't want to talk about it because it's just such an overused thing. It's kind of like cloud computing or AI. Everybody has one of those, and everybody has a DEI thing. The way that I think about it is that if you think of where we are in the world right now, companies, not-for-profit organizations, educational institutions, arts organizations, everything were designed by white men. All of them. There's not one that hasn't been. The rules were written by white men. The judges were white men. The people who determined whether you were following the rules — everything about the structures that we actually live in and we benefit from were built from the eyes through the eyes of a certain segment of the population. And during the time that they were making these great investments and unbelievable strides, the position of women and people of color, anybody like that wasn't like them, was a position of subservience. Not either legally structured that way — almost always legally structured that way — but also socially structured that way, meaning they actually thought it and believed it, and so did we. So we, literally we people who are not in that club, we've designed a whole world around these white men. And now we're starting to get a little bit antsy. We're like, 'Wait a minute, now I'm just as good and just as smart.' Half the population, you know, of women. 67% of the population is not white males. So we're now saying, 'Wait a minute, now let us in.' And what's happening is, we're trying to let them into the structures that they built. And so we have to actually change ourselves to fit in to that world. DEI is about some of that change. It's about us people who are not in, understanding and making that kind of course correction that we have to make. But it is as much, and more, about these structures understanding that they are unfair, unbalanced, that they are not set up for us. And that's where the I part comes in. And I think that what we're doing is, everybody's focusing on numbers, and we have to make — but it's more. It's as much about can we just step back and realize that we may have to kind of rebuild the building? I'm not — I'm not into, my nieces and my children are into burn the whole damn thing down and build it. I don't know. Young people are that way, good or bad. I don't know what that is, but I'm not there. But I know that if we don't make the changes to the structures that we have, laws that we have, what looks good on the educational resume, all that stuff — that we're going to have, if we don't do that as well as the people who are excluded making changes as well to be included more — then we're going to have a war in the streets. And that's what we started to see. That's what we're starting to see around capitalism: this war in the streets where people are like, 'This is not that system. I have no right, I have no rights in that system. So I have no respect for that system. I have nothing, no patience with that system. So I want to tear it down.' And that unfortunately, we have nothing to replace it with that's any better. This is the best system structurally I think around the world, but we're practicing it in such a way that's getting worse, not getting better. So my whole thing about DEI is, yeah, this is not a program. This is not, 'Let's figure out an exercise.' It's not an exercise. This is a — literally step back. We have some mental problems we have to go through counseling. We have some structural problems. We have to change the bathrooms, the elevators. We have law problems where literally women are just functionally discriminated against, and if you're black, we are not even allowed to teach history in certain states now because it's not about real history. Yeah, the state — yeah, I'm gonna say that too loud. It's not American history anymore; it's now this special history that doesn't exist. There are so many things we have to kind of pull back from and say, 'Let's really look at what we are starting with.' And I say to most CEOs who are still white men, the vast majority of them, 'Be careful here,' because they can wink at DEI and try to do it without changing anything. That's basically what people are trying to do: 'Let's just increase the numbers. Let's make sure those women go to these types of schools. Let's make sure that they study these kinds of things. Let's make sure that they do team sports so they could be more.' All of this stuff is not fixing the problem. It's stuffing us into a system that's not built for us. And I think to get the most out of us, we have to do both things on both sides. We have to make some adjustments, and we have to understand — white men have to understand that they're victims just like we are of a history that they did not build. So they have to actually be prepared to change it. Most of them are not.