Ursula Burns: “The Rules Are Made By White Men”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, now, we turn to a real-life manifestation of the American dream. As CEO of Xerox, Ursula Burns was the first African-American woman to run a Fortune 500 company. Well, now, she sits on the boards of Uber, ExxonMobil and Nestle and more. Her new memoir “Where You Are Is Not Who You Are” charts her incredible rise from the top from growing up on welfare to controlling a multi-billion-dollar company. Here she is speaking to Walter Isaacson.

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WALTER ISAACSON: Ursula burns, welcome to the show.

URSULA BURNS, AUTHOR, “WHERE YOU ARE IS NOT WHO YOU ARE”: Thank you. I’m happy to be here. I’m actually honored to be here.

ISAACSON: Well, it’s a wonderful memoir you’ve just written called and it’s “Where You Are Is Not Who You Are”. Explain to me that title.

BURNS: Well, my mother had all of these cookie sayings when I was growing up, this is one them that she used probably most often with myself and my brother and my sister. And it was to remind us that the place that we grew up in was not a place that signified our soul or our character, et cetera. She wanted to make sure that we were aware of the fact that since we were in poverty, living in less than stellar conditions, that was not where we should think of ourselves as being from or being in our souls. And she would follow this up with, where you are is not who you are, and she would follow it up with, remember that when you’re rich and famous. Now, my mother had no idea about richness and fame. I mean, we — she didn’t know about companies, CEOs. You know, the closest thing she got to fame was like actresses on TV. But she was smart tough to put in that tagline because she had aspirations for us and taught us that we should have aspirations for ourselves, that we would someday be major contributors in the world. And so, she didn’t want us to get our heads too big, she didn’t want us to forget the fact that we came from plain roots, that you don’t look at the surroundings or the trappings of a person and determine how or who that person is or how they will operate. It was amazingly inciteful statement during a time when if you could just see where we were, you would realize how odd it was for that to be one of her taglines to us.

ISAACSON: Where you were was in a housing project in the lower east side of Manhattan, right? With two siblings, she was a single mother. Tell me about her lessons you got from her raising you.

BURNS: Yes. So — by the way, she started saying this to me before we moved up to the housing project. Before the housing project. we were living in the tenements in Alphabet City or in avenue — 2nd Street and Avenue C. It was actually worse than the projects. When we got into the projects, we had — we literally thought we had arrived. It took — I was 10 or 11 by the time I moved into the housing projects. My mother is a single mother, immigrant from Panama. Three children. Literally high school educated, you know, very solid — I always called her maniacal. She was a maniacal parent, maniacal that she cared for and nurtured her three assets, her three assets were here three children. And – – but she struggled. She struggled every single day of her life. And when I was a teenager, about 16 years old, is when I first realized, like smashed in my face, just how difficult her life was, how tenuous every day was, how little money she had. She made — the most money she ever made was $4,400 a year. We lived welfare check to welfare check. I went to grade school and high school at a catholic school from 1st grade to 12th grade and she did — she paid for that, which when I was in high school was $65 a month. $650 a year out of $4,400 was what she literally dedicated to my education and my brother’s education and my sister’s education. She was just an amazing character, amazing strict, and like I said, maniacal about her children.

ISAACSON: When you were growing up, you thought you might be a teacher or a nun or something like that. And then you said in the book that you stumbled onto chemical engineering. How does one stumble onto chemical engineering?

BURNS: By the way, one of the reasons why I put this in the book and spend so much time on it is because the question that you just asked is the absolute perfect question for us to think about as we educate our children and our population for the future. How in the world do you stumble upon a career that is so valuable, that is so needed? How come there’s not more structure around giving that as an option? You know, my mother, typical mother, you’re going to go to college. You know, how are we going to go to college? We have no money. If we have no money, we have no access. And her thing was, you don’t worry about that, I worry about that. You worry about getting in. So, I remember having a guidance counselor come to me. I had taken this thing called the PSAT, the pre-SAT test, and I had done relatively well for my school in math. And the guidance counselor said, you you know, you should be — you should think about something to do with this math. But while I was there, I was looking in this book called the Barron’s book. And Barron’s book the most — the high — the most competitive colleges in the world, in the United States, you know, it still does that, obviously, and which careers paid the most money after four years of college. This basically — and I said, OK, this is an interesting section, I’ll look at that section. The career that paid the most money after four years of college, guess what it was? Chemical engineering. So, guess what I was going to be? A chemical engineer. I started in chemical engineering. But, Walter, I was so bad at chemistry that literally I was thinking of dropping out of college the first semester of college. I’m like, I hate chemistry. And my guidance counselor at college said, you don’t have to drop out, I mean, just kind of change your major. I said, you can do that? Oh, yes. What do you like? I said, I love my physics calls. I was taking my entry physics class, I loved it. She said, oh, just become a mechanical engineering. So, I changed to mechanical engineering and the rest is history. I loved it. But the reason for the story and the reason for your question is one of the things that I worked on a lot and still work on, is why is it that we don’t have more structured approaches to giving students options of understanding what’s needed in the world, and engineering is definitely something that’s needed in the world. What’s needed in the world, how your life would look if you actually pursued a career like that, how much money you would make, what kind of tasks you would do, and literally get you excited about this. And it turns out, in my time, when I was in college, it wasn’t there. And surprise, surprise, when I was working with President Obama on the STEM Task Force, it wasn’t there, either. And now, it’s getting a little more play, but still, it’s not a very structured guidance of our students to where jobs are needed, where jobs are plentiful and skills are needed.

ISAACSON: How do we get more women and more people of color into the engineering fields?

BURNS: Part of it is programmatic in the beginning of your life. It has to be — as I would always say when I was in Washington, it takes 16 years to make an engineer, 16 years, right? I mean, it takes 16 years to make just about anything. But you can start today and say, oh, I want a whole bunch of it. So, we have to start early and preparing foundationally the population for an appreciation and understanding and kind of joy and enjoyment around math and science. You have to have a love — a like for and understanding for and lack of fear for math and sciences to become an engineer. You just can’t kind of avoid it. But we have a whole bunch of structures that actually push kids away from it. We absolutely have to have more examples. So, this is like the flywheel effect. The more I speak about engineering to girls and boys of color and girls in general or just anyone, the more feedback I get about, my god, I had no idea, I had no idea. Still to this day, I had no idea, by and large the U.S. is still lagging behind the world. There are 28 nations in the world ahead of us in math and science competency and education.

ISAACSON: In your book you write a bit about affirmative action and you talk about how people may have thought or said to you that you got your positions because of that, and I think a phrase you use is, so be it. Explain that to me.

BURNS: Yes, I think that, you know, the society we live in today is structured by men, white men, it’s structured for men, primarily for white men. The rules are made by white men, et cetera, et cetera. And now, we call tools that allow people who are not white men to fit in, we call it affirmative action. To me, it’s a crazy way of putting it. We have a society that we know, even white women struggle to fit in. And we have to do — unless — I would call it not affirmative action if we were allowed to start all over again. If we were allowed to start all over again, and literally structure society where you’re not penalized for being able to give birth to the next generation, which women still are. Not penalized simply because the shade of my skin is different than your shade. If we could do away with all of those things in not only the hearts and minds of people but in the structures, like where we live, how we get into schools, how much we’re paid, how much flexibility we have and how we do our jobs, if you can do that in the fundamental structure, then you better have some actions that are affirmative towards the people who are excluded. And I’m saying, hey, if you have them, so be it. It shouldn’t get, and it doesn’t ever, at least in my life, have we gotten to we’re going to let you there even though you can’t do the job. We’re going to let you — we’re going to pay you that money even though you deserve to be paid less. It was all about I’m more than able to do the job, more than able. But you don’t look in the places where I am. You don’t go to the places where I — where you have relegated me to in the past and now, I feel very comfortable being there. And you’re saying, well, you know, we do most of our deals on the golf course. I’m like, what the hell. I don’t play golf. I don’t do that. So, you can’t do your deals on the golf course or whatever the non- affirmative thing is. We absolutely have to have a way, not to fix the sins of the past, but to level the playing field of today. And that’s what I think about, that’s why I say so be it.

ISAACSON: After the MeToo movement and the murder of George Floyd, there’s been a push for more diversity, including diversity in boardrooms. Where do you think we stand on that?

BURNS: An amazing amount of progress, but still not enough in the last year. Particularly in the last two years for women, we’ve increased the number in the C suite and the governance level, at the board level, increased a number of female directors, and we’ve done — and it’s happening in a way, which is the right way. So, not a token, right? So, people will say, well, we got one. We got our one. And I keep saying, what is a token? When is that a crowd? I did this thing with a whole bunch — not only me, but myself and a whole bunch of compatriots called the Board Diversity Action Alliance, which was this move to get at least one African-American director on every Fortune 500 board, it started there, but every board. Less than 3,000. We went everywhere. And then we expanded it from African-American to brown and black people because Hispanics are not doing any better, in many cases doing worse. We then expanded this to private equity firms and venture capital firms, in the leading structure of their portfolio companies, and we just done with this, there’s not — it’s going to be announced soon. But what I will give you a little bit of a preview of the data. Let me just say it’s horrible. It is amazingly poor, the representation of women and a little bit of progress there, but of people of color, it’s — you couldn’t come to a better — less diverse environment if you planned for it. I mean, it’s just, you know, awe-inspiring how effectively black people and brown people have been left out of this entire structure, and that — and women up until very, very recently have been left out of the structure completely.

ISAACSON: The pandemic has made it so that a lot of women had to or did drop out of the workforce. How do you see that changing and what can we do to regain the momentum we had in terms of women becoming part of the workforce?

BURNS: You’re so right, the pandemic. I was a part of the G7’s global Gender Equality Action Commission, the GEAC. It was really an amazing opportunity. And what I saw was what you just said, was, you know, from rich to poor, from the large to small, women disproportionately is just amazing, held the burden of care for either children, extended family, for nurturing, for education, for everything. And that burden, that additional burden resulted in them making the right call at that moment, which was they better take care of their families, they better take care of whatever. So, they had to drop out of the workforce. I think the immediate fix for that is, unfortunately long — there is no immediate fix for that. For the poorer nations and the poorer people, even in our nation, there are some fixes. We have to literally give them economic assistance. There is no — you know, as we come out of this pandemic and as we come out of this global just recession, we absolutely have to pay them such that they can actually engage the poop more actively in different types of work. We have to do that. We have to give them support mechanisms, or else we’re going to be in serious trouble in some of the more basic jobs in our society, there’s no reason to come back. So, that’s one. At the higher level, we have to get back to this thing that you talked — I said about, so be it, you know, affirmative action, so be it. This is back to the point, the structure of the society that we have, everything from business structure to educational structure, clearly, family structure, the religious structure, even, has to be re-jiggled a little bit to allow for better sharing or better single ownership of the future of our country. Not the economic future, the social future. Right now, it’s not set up in a way that there’s any real merit given to that. We have to do a lot of fundamental changing to have that happen. Businesses must — I mean, it’s a little bit easier for them, particularly from very senior large corporates, not all of this, it’s large corporates, particularly for very senior women, it’s really easy, very straightforward. You give them child care, you give them eldercare, you give them care, whatever it is you need, you give them access to ways that they can participate more fully in this lopsided democracy, this lopsided capital structure that we have. But in order for it to be truly fixed, that if we have the next pandemic, God forbid, you know, a generation from now or two, that we don’t end up in the same exact places that we have to start looking at the fundamental structures of everything that we do. And that’s why I talk about this idea about affirmative action. Affirmative action is only affirmative because the people who are there are not ready, willing, don’t know how, or whatever the language is, to actually make the playing field more naturally level.

ISAACSON: Should corporations take a stand on social justice issues or voting rights issues?

BURNS: Absolutely. No doubt about it. U.S. companies in the United States, they are benefiting from the social structure of this country, the history of this country. They are benefiting from the fact that we had seven generations of slavery, that we have had — literally, and for you to now not engage in a way that supports the current United States structure — I’m not talking about creating a new law. I’m not trying to figure out a way to do something different. I’m talking about the laws that sit today, that say that if you are a citizen of this country, you should have a clear and easy path to vote, a clear and easy path. It doesn’t say that if you’re a white citizen, you have one. And if you’re a black citizen who happens to live in a neighborhood and do a job that looks like this and that you can’t get to the post office, et cetera, et cetera, it doesn’t have any of those caveats.

ISAACSON: Ursula burns, thank you so much for joining us.

BURNS: You’re welcome, Walter. Like I said in the beginning, I’m honored to be here.