mPower Moments: On Reaching Your Full Potential with Ursula Burns
📅 Nov 20, 2024mbamortgage13 MIN1970 VIEWS14 SEGMENTS · 2 SPEAKERS
mPower Founder Marcia M. Davies sits down with Ursula Burns, former CEO of Xerox Corporation, for an in-depth conversation on how her upbringing impacted her career journey as well as how it shaped her leadership style. Burns also discusses the current state of the corporate world and emphasizes the importance of leveling the playing field for women to cultivate further progress in achieving workplace equity and equality. She also provides helpful advice on how the next generation can be agents of change when developing new corporate models that benefit all professionals.
Questions asked in this interview
4
0:50So can you tell me how it reflects your personal and professional journey?
3:47How did your early experiences shape your leadership style and business philosophies?
5:37You wrote in your book, quote, 'The corporate model is white male and we're conforming to the structure built by them.' Do you still believe that today and are we making any progress?
9:22What advice would you give young professionals, especially women and women of color, to aspire to higher roles, to those executive roles which are so closely held?
I'm here with Ursula Burns, a trailblazing executive with extensive experience in leading large organizations through change. When Ursula was named CEO of Xerox, she became the first black woman to lead a company in the Fortune 500. Ursula has gone on to many, many roles, including her current role as chairwoman at EverTree Insurance. I am thrilled and honored to have Ursula here today, and you've just had a book published in 2021 with the name of 'Where You Are Is Not Who You Are.' Welcome, Ursula.
I'm excited to have you here. Let's jump in. So the title of your book is there's a lot of significance to it. So can you tell me how it reflects your personal and professional journey?
Yeah, everything about me today is born from where I came from. Everything about where I came from was focused around my mom. My mother was a single parent. She died when I was 25 years old, when she was 49. She was a miracle worker. Now, when I was back there, I didn't think she was a miracle worker. I thought she was a little bit of a pain in the butt. But she was amazingly focused. She had three things that were important to her: one was my brother, second was me, and the third was my sister. She had three kids. She made very little money. She was a home health care, daycare worker. Kids came into our house from a little bit richer people, and we took care of them. My mother took care of them through the day, and her focus was on her kids. She had these isms. One of them was, 'Where you are is not who you are, and remember that when you're rich and famous.' Stuck with you. And she, what does she know about rich and famous? I mean, my mother knew nothing about that. She's from Panama. Rich people? Now you can actually Google this. Back then, nothing. It was nothing. Our neighborhood was the whole world. But she had some idea that we would end up in a place very different than where we were at that moment, and she was trying to prepare us for that. She would say, 'God doesn't like ugly.' And what she meant was not ugly physically, but ugly soul. She would say it all the time. 'God doesn't like ugly.' So she had these great sayings, all born from her upbringing, her background, and she just imparted them on us. I was the closest to her. I was a middle child, you know, normal pain in the ass kid. But she was just very clear, unwavering in her love, but also in her discipline and her expectations.
People think you can, and you do, of course. I mean, to an extent that you can get over this. To this day, I'm now my mother's been dead twice as long almost as she was alive in my life, and she is still unbelievably present in just about every major decision. She's like there, in my kids you can see her there. So obviously when you ask where does that come from and how much does it affect me today, it's like everything about me is from it. It's literally part of your DNA. Yeah, it's part of your DNA. Yes.
Burns, U. (2024, November 20). mPower Moments: On Reaching Your Full Potential with Ursula Burns [Interview transcript]. mbamortgage. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1057640/
MLA
Ursula Burns. "mPower Moments: On Reaching Your Full Potential with Ursula Burns." mbamortgage, 20 Nov. 2024. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1057640/.
BibTeX
@misc{burns2024_1057640,
author = {Ursula Burns},
title = {mPower Moments: On Reaching Your Full Potential with Ursula Burns},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, mbamortgage. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2024},
month = {nov},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1057640/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
