Anne Mulcahy exhibited excellent leadership during her tenure as the CEO of Xerox. She took over the helm as Xerox was reeling from an accounting scandal and the departures of the former CEO and CFO. Furthermore, Xerox was shut out of the commercial paper market which required the company to draw down on its $7 billion loan facility. Anne found herself in charge of a company with lagging products, $14 billion of debt, an unsettled management team and fierce competition.
Anne did a fabulous job of refocusing the company to promote color copying and document preparation and to build a value-add service operation. While keeping people focused on transforming the company to compete effectively in the market, she dealt with the financial restructuring in a way to ensure Xerox's financial viability for the foreseeable future.
A key takeaway from her efforts for leaders everywhere is, get your people entirely focused on producing operating results and transforming the business so that there is no time to worry about problems that are outside of their control. This takes the leadership ability to get people fired up on the direction of the company is taking and motivated to produce results for which they will be rewarded.
Cheers, Mike
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I agree. I have heard her speak about the turnaround several times and met her at two seperate Fortune Most Powerful Women in Business Conferences. She exudes leadership. She is straight forward and candid and allows gives praise to the employees of Xerox.
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