Next, how a Fortune 500 company changed its approach to corporate diversity, an effort that began more than two decades ago. Our economics correspondent Paul Salmon has the story, part of his reporting on Making Sense of Financial News. I can't type. I don't take dictation.
The face of Xerox in the early 1960s. Soft-selling the company's first retail copier. My boss calls me indispensable.
Miss Jones. Just a minute. Will you make a copy of this? Naturally.
Xerox has come a long way. Besides copiers and increasingly document services, the CEO is selling something else in this era, diversity. You have to have as many people who are capable engaged in the solution. And if you don't, then, you know, shame on you.
A $22 billion company doing business in more than 180 countries, with 140,000 employees and hundreds of plants, Xerox has been run by Ursula Burns since 2009. Her predecessor was also a woman. So how did the company go from this... I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing a button....to the first Fortune 500 firm ever...
to have successive female CEOs. Well, the drive to diversity began not long after the ad. In the summer of 1964, amid race riots near Xerox headquarters in Rochester, New York, founder Joe Wilson met with black leaders.
And found out that the reason why they were rioting is because they did not have access to jobs. So he pledged that the black people of the community would be able to get jobs at Xerox. By 1991, when we first reported on diversity at Xerox, 9 percent of its top managers were black, compared to a national average of just half a percent.
The company mandated managers like Kent Amos to fulfill its diversity mission. KENT AMOS, We're going to trust it, trust you, and empower you to be African-Americans, and bring that to the table. And it worked. PAUL SOLMAN, In fact, Ursula Burns was recruited by Xerox as part of its summer minority internship program in 1980. But, she says, affirmative action didn't extend to gender.
MARGARET BRENNAN, We looked up one day, and all of the African-American men were doing better. I mean, they were leaders of the company, and there were very few women of any race, right? So we said, oh, my God, we have to do something about women. PAUL SOLMAN, For instance, why were there so few female plant managers, a key rung up the ladder?
MARGARET BRENNAN, It turns out you have to work the shifts in manufacturing. You have to be there from 9 to whatever the heck it is, 8 to 5. And literally, we would put people in the same position. plant managers in and they would bomb out women plant managers, primarily because we had zero flexibility.
These things we would have never, ever, ever figured out until we realized a woman in there said, we're not dumb in manufacturing. We need a lot more flexibility than you're allowing us to have. And so job sharing, or splitting a full-time position into two part-time jobs, was instituted.
Still, for years, women were more visible than audible, says 40-year Xerox veteran veteran Diane O'Connor. I'm almost always the last person to speak up. Early on in my career, they never would have gotten to me, because the first three or four guys that said, here's what we have to go do, and they said, yep, we're going to go do it. I'm still sitting in my chair, and they've all gone to the men's room, and I'm still sitting there going, oh, well, I guess that's decided. As a vice president, O'Connor now runs the meetings and is active in the Women's Alliance, a Xerox-sanctioned independent worker group which advocates...
mentors, networks. Corporate speed dating, make a contact, make a pit. Innovative, energetic, results-oriented. Right now, I manage one account nationally. Five minutes, and it's on to the next.
OK, that's time. The Women's Alliance is one of several caucus groups that promote women at Xerox offices around the country. There's also the Black Women's Leadership Council.... of goals and aspirations.
don't know that if you don't share that. JEFFREY BROWN, Xerox engineer Marina Thurayil chaired the Women's Innovation Group, which addresses a common malady, shrinking violet syndrome. MARINA THURAYIL, Xerox engineer, I've heard someone say, if it's gold, it will shine. It's not your job to market yourself or to kind of showcase your work, because that's considered immodest.
I'm not sure if that's the right word. But it's not just women helping women. JEFF JACOBSON, President, London Office of Technology, A natural fit, as I think about where I see my career progressing, is to lead one of the business group organizations.
PAUL SOLMAN, In Russia, the number of women in the business group is growing. Rochester, New York, VP Rogni Mehta is his protege. And I wanted to get your feedback on whether you think that that's too ambitious and what are some of the experiences I would need to accrue in order to be an eligible candidate for one of those roles.
So certainly never feel anything's too ambitious for you. Now, not every woman needs pumping up. Paul Allaire, CEO in the 1990s, mentored Ursula Burns.
Appearing on The History Makers with host Gwen Ifill, Allaire recalled that Burns was no wallflower. We went through a number of fairly high-level meetings, and on the way back from them, I asked her, I said, Ursula, what did you think? And her answer was, I could do this.
I said, what? She says, I could do this. I could do your job.
I could be CEO. Now that she is CEO, Burns is one of nine female top executives at Xerox. More than a quarter of the company's corporate leaders are women. to just 15 percent at other Fortune 500 companies, and 20 percent of top managers are minorities.
We approach issues from different perspectives, no doubt about it. If I actually had my leadership team and they were all African-American female from New York City engineer, the conversation would be easy. And you would trust each other implicitly?
And you would trust each other implicitly, and your perspective would be excluding a lot of different perspectives. So we would feel great in the room, and it was a really efficient meeting. We got it all kind of wrapped up.
Everything is pretty. cool. We walk out and our clients are different, our work force is different than that.
It's just it wouldn't be a good business model. RAY SUAREZ. Burns thinks diversity actually helped save the company. Long threatened by digital imaging, Xerox transformed itself, from machine maker to service provider.
Easy pass, toll collection and call centers now account for more than half of all revenue. The way to weather change, says Burns... RAY SUAREZ....is to engage... as much difference, as much breadth as you can, because that gives you little peeks into where some of the big opportunities will be.
PAUL SOLMAN. And big ideas from new perspectives. Moreover, says Senior Sales Vice President Pat Elizondo, diversity in general, and women in particular, are vital to courting customers for the growing services business.
PAT ELIZONDO. Women are better listeners. It takes patience to truly actively listen and understand and walk away from a client discussion understanding.
What are they asking us to give them? As somebody whose profession is to listen, I'm taking some umbrage in this comment. I just want you to know. Well, I have repeated a couple of things twice for you, Paul.
Looking for some reassurance, perhaps, I felt I had to ask Burns. We men aren't in any danger of becoming obsolete, are we? Yeah, men are useful.
They're more than useful. Obviously, we want men in there. Men, women, minorities from everywhere in the world. Xerox has had a gay and lesbian caucus for more than 20 years, multiple points of view to adapt to a global, ever-morphing market. The only thing the company doesn't have, the stereotypes of the past.
Here, Mr. Smith, I'm going to lunch with Mother.