Woman-to-Woman Succession at Xerox as Mulcahy Steps Down - Building Gender Balanced Business

• Anne Mulcahy, possibly the most celebrated woman CEO for her turnaround of a dying Xerox as well as for her public demeanor, announced May 21, 2009, that she was turning over her post to Ursula Burns, the Xerox president who has long been Mulcahy’s right-hand woman.

• Burns becomes the first African-American woman to head a Fortune 500 company.

• The handover, which was long expected but came sooner than forecast, is the highest-ranked woman-to-woman CEO succession in terms of company size.

• Mulcahy and Burns both have spent their careers at Xerox, which has a tradition of developing talent from within its ranks. Burns has told interviewers that she stayed at Xerox during its flirtation with bankruptcy in the early part of the decade because she trusted Mulcahy’s leadership, BusinessWeek reports.

• Mulcahy’s pioneering style as a female CEO included such women-friendly initiatives as calling for more reasonable and flexible hours by managers at companies.

The BusinessWeek report