When the very name of your company is expressed as a verb, there are lofty expectations to meet and a requirement to continually innovate. For Ursula M Burns, CEO of Xerox, the nearly $17 billion company that is issued an average of 10 new patents per day, innovation is essential for business growth and meeting the ever-increasing demands of customers.

Burns, who shared her thoughts on innovating during the World Innovation Forum, says the global economic crisis forced Xerox to cut $1 billion out of its expense base to maintain its competitive edge and reposition.

"Crisis is a great motivator," Burns shared. "When people think things are going well, there is no reason to change. It's a natural human resistance...the best time to change is when everything, a lot of things, are uncertain and connect that thought to action," she added. Burns explained that repositioning the company forced it to challenge long-held operating expectations, like the company continuing to do all of its own manufacturing.

"We turned our own screws and we had to make a fundamental change," she recalled. "We got it done in a year-and-a-half, and it actually opened up other possibilities we could invest in," the Xerox chief explained.

Making that change required the company's senior-management team to resist the urge to over-communicate. Burns said there had to be some recognition that if top leaders shared a new business agenda, other leaders across the enterprise would help translate that in the languages of their respective teams, in order to focus their collective efforts on the changes that aligned with the new goals.

"One of the most amazing things I think about companies is that companies have cultures. When people say 'change your culture,' you would change your people, but that's not really what you want to do," Burns said. "To be a transformational leader means allowing and letting...I don't know the answers to all the questions. I want to give them allowances and freedoms to pursue [the answers]."

Joseph Daniel McCool
Joseph Daniel McCool is senior contributing editor with ExecuNet and principal of management recruiting/succession advisory firm The McCool Group. He is also the author of Deciding Who Leads: How Executive Recruiters Drive, Direct & Disrupt the Global Search for Leadership Talent, recognized widely as "one of the best business books of 2008," and its Brazilian Portuguese translation, Escolhendo Líderes, published in June 2010.

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