Where you are is not who you are A memoir

Ursula Burns, 1958-

Book - 2021

""I am a black woman who doesn't play golf, doesn't belong to or go to any club, doesn't like NASCAR, doesn't like country music, and has a Science degree in engineering. I speak differently, very fast, with an accent and a set of vernacular that is New York City, definitely Black tilted. So when someone says I'm going to introduce you to the next CEO of Xerox, and the candidates are lined up against a wall, I would be the first one voted off the island." Where You Are is Not Who You Are is an engaging memoir by Ursula Burns, former Chief Executive Officer of the Xerox Corporation. Her appointment as the first African American woman to head a Fortune 500 company in 2010 drew headlines, which, Ms. Burn...s insists, missed the real story. "It should have been-How did this happen? How is it possible that the Xerox Corporation produced the first African American woman CEO? Not this spectacular, ridiculous one about, Oh, my god, a black woman making it." How was it possible? Burns writes movingly about her journey from growing up in tenement housing on the Lower East Side of Manhattan to the highest echelon of the corporate world. Her champion was her single Panamanian mother, Racquel Olga Burns, who set no limits on what her children could achieve. A licensed child care provider, Racquel Burns, whose highest annual income was $4,200, managed to send Ursula and her siblings to the local parochial school and to send Ursula on to a Catholic High School where a nun told her she had three choices for her future: a nun, a teacher or a nurse. But Ursula wanted to make money to help her mother. Taking advantage of the opportunities and social programs brought about by the Civil Rights and Women's movements, Ursula was accepted into many colleges, including Yale. Instead she chose to pursue engineering at Brooklyn Poly Tech and then at Columbia graduate school, sponsored by Xerox, where she had been a summer intern. Burns writes about race. Her classmates, and later, her colleagues, almost all white males, "couldn't comprehend how a Black girl could be as smart, and in some cases, smarter than they were. So they made a special category for me. Unique. Amazing. Spectacular. That way they could accept me." Burns writes about gender in the corporate world. "We all start out with two arms and two legs and a head, but it you're born white with two testicles and a penis, you're already way ahead of the game." Burns writes about the current Pandemic, comparing it to the financial crisis of 2007/08. "The whole economic system as we know it, was literally put on stop, not hold, stop. The earlier crisis was difficult to be sure, but the Pandemic has created financial challenges that make that time seem like child's play." She also discusses the fact that 60 percent of the jobs that exist today will be eliminated in the next 10-20 years. Always on the side of the laborer, she celebrates a time when CEOs lived in the communities alongside their workers, while showcasing the ways corporate culture is destroying the spirit of democracy. Burns' 35-year career at Xerox was all about fixing things, from cutting millions of dollars as head of manufacturing to save Xerox from bankruptcy to acquiring a $6 billion business services company to give Xerox a future. She worked closely with President Barack Obama as Chair of his Export council, traveled with him on an official trade mission to Cuba and became one of his greatest admirers. Candid and outspoken, this memoir takes the reader inside the c-suites of corporate America, and reveals it through the lens of a Black woman-someone who puts humanity over greed and justice over lining the pockets of the few"-- more