Ursula Burns, Where You Are Is Not Who You Are: A Memoir

Happy to be here and happy to

Story. Yeah, it was at the urging of so many people and at the end of the day, it was my husband and Vernon Jordan, my kids and my nieces who said just go ahead and do it. As I was, so let me clarify the two things about newsworthiness and then reluctance. Right? There was nothing, you know, you live your life. I said this in the book: you live your life a day at a time. Get up in the morning, you do something, you do work, sometimes it's spectacular, a child is born, most of the time it's pretty ordinary. You make breakfast on a Sunday, whatever it is. But when you're living your life, you don't think about these individual days chunk together in amazing experiences. They're just days. And for me, for sure, I lived my life looking forward more than looking backward. So when I was thinking about the book and people were saying write the book, I keep saying what would I write about exactly? How do you write about these many different days in your life? I read, I'm an avid reader, and I read these books and fiction generally, but amazingly done, great imagination, all this like that compelling, embracing stories, and I'm like I've lived my life for the last and it didn't seem to sound anything like the books I was reading. Right? So it was really, really

Hard. And so that's one the reluctance of an author. I'm an engineer. I do know how to write some business papers. I definitely read a lot. And the one thing you would never consider me or I would never consider myself was an author. When you said you're an author, I'm like who would read this stuff? I don't know if I write well enough to do that. So it's I guess what happens with most authors who are not authors who write a book, a purposeful book like you know I'm writing about my memoir etc. You step back and go, my God, this is not worthy. It turned out to be hard too, obviously, because memoirs are actually about your life and the time that I started writing the book, I had gone through or was going through some really tough times. I was going through, you know, a presidency. I had moved to London because I just couldn't bear being in the United States. I couldn't bear listening daily, every day to this crazy discord that we knew would be bad but it had gotten so bad. By 2018 and 2017, I couldn't take it. I'm so happy I moved, you know. Felt guilty about doing it, but I had to move out of the country. That was one. My husband was sick, a little sick. That was another one. I was transitioning jobs. That was another one. So it was all kind of not the best time. Or it turns out in hindsight it was the perfect time, because what you needed to do in hindsight was reflect, exactly reflect, reflect, reflect. So so I

Evolve as you began writing it? No, it wasn't. It was my objective, but it wasn't an objective, right. One of the things that is, one of the things that I'm known for, and I don't say this like famous known for, one of the things that I am known for who I am is that I am pretty no-nonsense, I'm pretty direct, and people say authentic. And what that means is that I haven't been trained, and this is not necessarily a good thing, so not everybody can follow this advice, but I have been trained to butter up a story or clean it up too much. There's a whole bunch of or to be graceful in some of the you know to soften the blow. I try in the book obviously you can see it even in the book where I just avoid things or they're too personal about somebody else. But I think generally, when I write this in the book, I say that I as a CEO was really not great at taking looking at dumb questions in kind of you know, I just couldn't. It's my nature about, you know, somebody asked me a question, I answer the question. I don't know the answer, I say I don't know the answer. This whole idea that there's this dancing around it and long words and explanations around stuff that, that's not me. So the reason why it is authentic or personal or right is because that's all I know. It's not another way for me to do it. I don't know how to do it a different way. This is not necessarily always a good thing, right? There are times when you literally have to figure out a way to just get the heck out of there, I mean just make a dash for the door. But definitely in this book it was not a place that I could. I felt that I needed to so I didn't even try. It was not something I focused on. Well, I tell you, what I said was what I thought in the book. It came through and I tell you it resonated very much for me.

Oh for sure, yeah for sure. One of the things about the racial reckoning, I actually don't think it's only a racial reckoning. I think that the racial reckoning is the foundation for a fundamental restructuring of our society. You know, whenever you think about whenever society, US society, thinks about people in need or bad things happening, one of the things that's funny about this is that it appears in the face of a black person, right? But we have as many white people, actually more in pure numbers, who are living below the poverty line. We have as many white people who don't have access to good food, to good health, to good education. So it's not necessary for us to actually find the black guy, even though whatever is generally happening to the white guy happens in spades—no pun on words—to the black guy. So I think that the racial reckoning is more than just a racial reckoning, it's a societal reckoning around the structure of our society, which is one that has created a massive divide between a small number of people who have a ton and a very large number of people who have less than a ton, and a large number of people at the end who have less than a sustainable lifestyle. I mean they struggle. My mother, and the reason why it's so personal to me was, and the pandemic made this clear, I wrote this in the book and the book was essentially finished before the pandemic kind of started. Then you had to go back and write it, rewrite that. I mean it wasn't totally finished but by the time the pandemic came up, we thought we would be out of this, remember when it started? 'Oh yeah, a couple of months, they'll get us.' Whatever. It took a year and a half for this thing, and it kept getting darker and darker and darker and darker. So you have to kind of go back and look at the point. I make this point in the book that my mother would have been a fundamental casualty of the pandemic. Our family would have not made it because my mother's income was very low. She got food stamps, welfare, and even with that she got rent supplements. My mother had to find work to close the gap. I mean this is pretty standard, unfortunately, but it's pretty standard. It's not only my mother who was singled out, my whole neighborhood was living this way. She did child care, helped work in her house, she was in a state-sanctioned program where she had children come into her house, you know, lower middle class people who were working, they brought their kids and we took care of them in a day. My mother took care of them in a day. We had four or five, she was licensed to have four or five. She made $4,400 a year, her highest salary. And that was that. And the welfare took care, and rent supplements, and bartering, and whatever we could do took care of us. But imagine if we were alive and living our life now, the $4,400 would have been zero, because nobody coming in our house exactly. And we would not have been able to survive. I remember when I turned about 16 or 17 years old, I realized my mother was struggling. Up until that point I was just this clueless kid who ate good tasting food every single night, we had a stark but extremely clean, very well organized and kind of decorated apartment in a very bad building. We went to school every single day. My mother would bargain hunt, she'd go to thrift shops, so we had clothes all the time, it wasn't new or fancy but it was fine. So here we were, my brother and my sister, just kind of going along, we'd get up every morning and do whatever, and my mother was literally struggling and panic stricken. I could just imagine now. I started to realize it when I was 16 or 17 that she was struggling. She was struggling emotionally because she was always worried about us, and she was struggling financially. She just couldn't keep up. And so she ended up dying when I was 25 and she was 49. And it took me so long to realize maybe that's what she was trying to do—she was trying to not make it our problem, to make it her own. My plea in a lot of the work I talk about is it should be no one's problem. That should not be the basis of your day every day. You can't get up, 'Oh my God, how we going to feed them? How we going to keep them safe? I have to spend every penny I make, barter, go in debt. We had to get them an education that was above the absolute disastrous education we would have gotten if we went to public schools.' And so it should not be this hard to get the basic needs, yes, to people, particularly to young people. You shouldn't even be able to be mean about it. That's one of the things that troubled me in the discourse that's happening today, particularly when President Trump was president. I didn't agree with President Trump, but he was the president, somebody voted him in. I didn't vote for him, but that's fine. I was just like other Republican presidents or Democratic presidents I didn't agree with or Senators, I said yeah, they're the leaders. But something changed here. There was a change in the tone. The tone was mean. The tone was 'you deserve it.' The tone was just different. So I remember thinking my mother is in this environment and President Trump would say she deserves to be there, and so does your family. So anyway, I get really emotional about that, not because I was suffering back then, but I just realized that there are a lot of people out there today who were making it, just getting by, and then the entire rug got pulled from under them. They're now out of their houses, living in hotels. It's just a disaster. So anyway, I'm sorry.

The best advice that she gave me, the best saying that she had, she had a lot of good ones, but was 'God doesn't like ugly.' Now just think about this statement. God doesn't like ugly. She didn't mean ugly people, she meant an ugly soul, an ugly spirit, a mean person. She said this all the time when I would, I'm pretty introverted person meaning I live kind of in my space, so I would get silent and sullen, a little bit snappy sometimes, you know, rude. I was a very well behaved kid though. But when that happened, she would say to me 'God doesn't like ugly.' And it's a good check throughout my life, particularly as I got more and more powerful and wealthier. That's the best. The other one that she said a lot was what in the book the title of the book. She would say to me, and this was interesting the way she said it, was 'Max, where you are is not who you are. And don't forget this when you are rich and famous.' Now you have to understand how bizarre this was in hindsight. I was like how the heck did she know? I went to high school, grade school, high school. We didn't know who CEOs of companies were back in 1970. We didn't know that. We didn't have Google to look up what these people who they were. I had no clue. My mother had less clue than I had. And she said this thing to me and I'm like rich and famous? How in the world does she even think about richness and fame? Because we never spoke about this in my household. She spoke about being a good person, carrying your own weight, taking care of my brother and sister, not being ugly, leaving behind more than you take away. She never talked about earning a lot of money or ascending the corporate ladder or being rich or being famous. But she something in her knew that she tagged on that thing at the end that is exactly where I was. I am rich and famous, and you can be, and when you're rich and famous, excuse the curse word, you can get away with it. And my mother made it very clear that that would be as bad, maybe worse, than behaving like your physical environment was poor, dirty, unforgiving. That environment was not who we were. That happened to be where we were. And remember this, girlfriend, when you are sitting on the top of the world and you start acting like a jerk, that's not who you are either. You have to remember that that position is not your soul. That position is not you. That's not how you present yourself. How you present yourself is with this thing, not with your wallet. You don't pull out your wallet and say 'here's who I am.' So yes.

I said 'I love physics,' I love my first physics class and I love my first calculus class. She said that sounds like a mechanical engineer. I said okay, I'll be a mechanical engineer. The reason I tell that story is because it was that casual, and because most kids never get that story. I learned about engineering when I was a junior rising senior in high school. I'd never heard of the damn thing before, I didn't know what they did. I knew I liked math, I knew I was reasonably good at it. I had no idea that I was so far behind. I went to a Catholic school, I had nuns who taught me. They said three things you can be: a nun, a nurse, or a teacher. None was out of the question, but I looked at how much they made and I thought, I can't rescue my family on that amount of money. So I went to the library and looked at a book called The Baron's book. I looked up the most competitive colleges and the careers that paid the most money after four years of college in 1976. Chemical engineering was the top. I said, 'I'm going to be a chemical engineer.' I had no clue what I was doing, but fortunately it turned out okay.

My mother gave me access to curiosity and a whole bunch of things. I went to a really good high school that was not educationally expert, but I was educated in the fundamentals very well. I didn't have a lot of access to everything else. My mother did the fundamentals: work hard. The school taught me how to write my letters well. I'm a parent and I know that in schools today kids don't learn how to write, they don't learn penmanship anymore. You're going to learn how to diagram a sentence, how English structure should be. In college, it was the same: I had the fundamentals. Get good study partners, study with people, do it over and over again, just focus on it, fight your way through it. That served me well.

Well, I mean, first let's answer the first part, the second part first. You have to do it. In order to run a company well, you kind of have to know the place, or at least know a lot about a place that's very similar to that place. The worst CEOs are people who have no clue what the culture is, who have no clue what the work that people do is. That's not a good place to come from. I was fortunate enough to have Xerox, which was the perfect company for me. It was a struggling company, a little scrappy, it had a long history of diversity. We were far from perfect, but we were further ahead by 50 years than most companies at the time. We had black male scientists. My husband was hired in the 1960s when there were no black professionals in most companies. They were more concerned about what I had in my head than how I looked or how I spoke. They needed you to solve a problem, they asked if you were interested. It was an amazing place to work. They already had the science consulting program and Prism, working with inner-city schools in Rochester to get students interested in science. I didn't know Xerox, but I locked into it. When I went there, they kept asking me to do things: work in this lab, work on this problem, go to Japan, go to England. It seemed like there was a plan, but it was more a matching: I was open, they were needy; I was needy, they were open. We fit together. It was the perfect company for me. I don't think I would have made it to be CEO in another company. Xerox was a really good place for me. I was disruptive and they allowed for some of that disruption, and they corrected me when it was out of control.

We had a director on the board from the day I started working at the company. We had directors who were black and women. This was in the early 1980s, which was unheard of. There were no blacks, very few blacks and very few women. We had both on our board. We had a founder and a culture that was about looking outside the company to get help and to help. It was a perfect place for me to go, and I fortunately stayed.

It was just like, every question that you've asked so far is part of the key factors for my success. This is my mother, going to this company, the career I chose or that was chosen for me, and my husband. My husband was a very, very peculiar man. He was born in Bermuda, 20 years older than I am. He died in 2019, very unexpected, crushed me. I'm not going to cry. He was one of the first African-American professionals in the research and science area. He would have been fired from most other companies. He was very different: he wore dashiki to work, had a massive afro, beard and mustache. He sometimes drank too much, he smoked, he ran the streets. He did everything that you do. I loved him, he loved me, and he was perfect for me. Even if you were a fly on the wall, you would say what the heck is going on here? How does this work? We argued, we fought, we never physically fought, but we'd argue, stomp out the room, scream at the kids. But there was one thing that was never in doubt: I loved him enough to keep trying, and he loved me enough to keep trying. It was effort for us to fit together. I warn my kids now, who are both engaged, I keep saying to them: write down the things you love about the person and the things you don't like. Cut the things you love in half, take the things you hate and intensify them by two and double them. If you can look at that picture and still say okay, that's the right person. That was my husband and that was me.

The things that he loved about me, you get older, you get tired. I had great legs, but I don't know what it was. The things that he didn't like about me: I was controlling, a little bit of a nag, a perfectionist. I got worse as I got older. Same thing for him: he was disorganized, didn't get much better as he got older, he was sloppy, visually sloppy. He was dyslexic, so planning wasn't his strong suit, and that got worse. All the things I loved about him got less, and he was still worth keeping. I was lucky there. He was 20 years older than I was, so by the time my life got crazy at work, I traveled 20 weeks a year, then 30, then 35 weeks a year. It became unmanageable to get home in any reasonable time to prepare meals, pick them up, do whatever. My husband had been at the company for 42 years. He said, 'I like this thing I'm doing, but this is getting harder. It is getting easier just to keep it all going.' We sat down, he said, 'I can retire.' I said, 'If you can survive not getting up and going to work every day, that part of the discipline, this is great.' He said he could absolutely survive that. He left and took care of our kids. He cooked meals, dressed the kids, did my daughter's hair, not the way I would have, but it all got done. I would complain when I came home, and he would say, 'If you don't like it, you can just stay home and do it, otherwise shut your mouth.' He was perfect for me.

I think I make it clear in the book that I failed more than I succeeded, so this is not like I had a perfect solution. But a couple of things were really important: both my kids were teenagers, and both of them needed their mother as well as their father, not for physical care, but you can imagine being a black boy in America or a black girl in America at any time. My husband and I were very aware of this, particularly for my son who was tall, brilliant, well-mannered. You knew that if he walked out the door, he was viewed totally differently, he was at risk. This was well before George Floyd. We talked to him a lot about relationships with women, with white people, with authority. My daughter was not under as much physical pressure, but every social pressure, the girl thing in 2010 was a disaster. These kids have more choices than they know what to do with. So I had to make sure that I didn't let weekends and some very important things fall by the wayside. I had to discipline myself to do that. I failed a lot, but I tried, so that's that.

I knew that when my husband made the decision to stop working, we could have had a babysitter. We made enough money to have a living babysitter, and we lived in a house big enough. But we had a discussion and we said we're not going to outsource our children. We wanted to have something to do with them, we wanted to have everything to do with them. If you meet my daughter and my son, you will see maybe too much of my husband and me in them. I want them to take advantage of opportunities and take risks, especially since we can cover some of their risks. When I was growing up, I locked into a great career, but if I had chosen the wrong one I would have had to stay in it. I got my master's degree and thought about getting my PhD, but I didn't think I could do it. My mother needed money, we needed money. My kids don't have those limitations. I want them, with the same values, to go as far as they can. My daughter wants to be a writer, she's getting her PhD in English literature. She has two master's degrees. She said her brother is going to have to support her because she'll never make a lot. I said don't worry about that, that's not what you go to it for. We wanted our kids to have that kind of thinking and foundation. We wanted them to have discipline and expectations. That was for us to do, nobody else. That's why I wanted to stay close to home, and that's why we decided my husband should not go back to work. Once they got into school, it got harder. We had to give them cell phones because they played volleyball, it was a mess. But they were both very practical kids, no crazy misbehaving. We managed our kids close to home.

The STEM journey was personal, totally personal. I am who I am partly because of the thing I chose to study, and I chose it by accident, total incomplete decision. Chemical engineering: I had no idea, it was not an option presented to me, not something people talked about. Most black people and definitely poor people, black poor people, were never presented with the opportunity. It was like 'not for you.' And I was a girl. Women and girls do not study engineering. Teachers steered you away, tracked you to something else: be a nurse, a teacher, a life scientist, not engineering. It was a specifically male, white career. I had access to work at the best companies, earning a real wage from the time I graduated from college, working on real stuff. This is a career. Think about what we're dealing with: the need for more sustainable solutions to everything. We fly, we build taller buildings, population towards eight billion, we need more sustainable ways to get nutrition, potable water, faster transportation. All of these are engineering problems. It's amazing that we still have a system that doesn't highlight this and say 'become a lawyer.' I like lawyers, but we don't need a lot more lawyers. We need a lot more engineers. We should train and make available to young people, particularly young people of color and women, because the numbers are so large. Even if every white male became an engineer, we'd still be short. We need women, half the population, and people of color. 65-70% of the world is not white men, and most of them are not studying engineering. Look at my life: simple life, great job, great pay, reasonable pay, pretty high demand, yes, matter.

Fortunately, I went to a company that had the science consulting program and Prism way before this was a hot thing. I went to President Obama, who thought STEM was important, so he called me and said can you work on this thing. It falls together. I think we are beyond the idea that we can be a great America without having great scientists and engineers. Thank goodness we're finally getting to the point where we realize we have to train not just white guys, but white women, black women, black men, Hispanic people, Indian people, whatever. For our national security, we have a great way of life here. It's not perfect, I talk about it in my book. I've been all over the world, every continent except Antarctica. I live in London, and there is not a better place than the United States of America. Most of the time I'm so pissed off at it, it drives me crazy, but this is not bad. We were on the path of really messing it up: under-educating, under-caring, not looking out for each other. This is not a zero-sum country, and not a zero-sum world. If it were, we would have killed everybody over five billion people. We have seven and a half. We have to do it better. Somebody does not have to starve for me to eat. We have to figure out a way to take care of ourselves and then take care of others. The others are generally close to your family, then you take care of others. It's not: I take care of myself and hoard the rest while I see others dying on the road. We can't make charity a business: rape and pillage the world, make a lot of money, then give it back. That's not charity, it's abuse. We have to make sure charity is really charity. I'm preaching now, sorry.