Leadership in Anne Mulcahy

Leadership in Anne Mulcahy

Xerox was once the largest document handling equipment manufacturing company in the world. By the year 2001, it had faced multiple problems and difficult situations that lead the company leaders to think about bringing up a change in the company. There were multiple forces and triggers that made Xerox to go in for the change process. This impact or the forces can be divided into 3 segments, External, Internal and Temporal. Knowing the factors and that it was a critical to save the company, by common consensus, Anne Mulcahy was appointed the CEO. (Pearce, 1996)

Anne Mulcahy was known for being a part of the people. She empowered the people of Xerox to be able to approach the people at any level of hierarchy freely with any kind of information. In an interview with the magazine Computerworld, Anne accepted the fact that creating effective communication was on the biggest priority on her list (Tennant 2008). This helped her most in taking an effective organization pulse. In a talk at The University of Virginia (As per a published video on YouTube), Anne said that at the time of her joining, there was only one question among the employees. The employees were ready to give in their 200%, but they wanted to know that if it was worth it. As a part of motivating the employees towards the goal, Anne showed then the vision of the future. A fictitious Wall Street Journal article, dated five years ahead in time, was written and distributed. The article showed the final held position of the organization five years down the line. This helped Anne a great deal in rebuilding a healthy Physiological Contract with the employees making sure the fear regarding the job security and trust was established. (Morris, 2003)

At the customer level Anne followed the policy of "Partner or Perish". This way the customers were allowed to work in close partnership with Xerox to come up with newer ideas. Gaining the customer focus and the trust of the stake holders in not letting the company file for bankruptcy, Anne was able to develop the action plan and was ready to build the new company over it. According to Lewin's model for change, we can say that this entire process was the process for unfreezing the current scenario. Hence discussing the change process as second step of the Lewin's model we can see the wide variety of changes that were done by Anne. Xerox came up with new business partnerships like the FujiXerox, to come up with new technologies. Also it was ready to launch products with competing technologies. In spite of all the changes that the organization went through, Anne did keep in mind that in this process of change she should not be changing the core capabilities of the company. One of them being the R&D of the company which was always considered as the core competency of the company was kept alive by regular required investments.

After the change was successfully completed, it was required that it was made sure that the changes are reflected in all the aspects of the company culture and are sealed to be followed at all times. This, in Lewin's model form, would be considered as the third step of the entire change process. The representation was shown in the new logo to people external to the company. In Anne's own words "It's so important that our employees feel the connection and the integrity of the brand messaging, so we wanted them to be the first to see it." (Anonymous 2009)

In an interview by Chief Executive's J.P. Donlon, Anne Mulcahy was asked the following question and provided the following answer

Every CEO wants to get a better return on the R & D spending. What do you do achieve this?

First, don't do everything. Sometimes companies that are R & D intensive get caught up in having to do everything. We decided to work with partners whenever possible. We started to use our Fuji Xerox partner more intelligently. We looked at our manufacturing and concluded that we're not good at manufacturing for high-volume products. We outsourced all of that to Flextronics. We sought to work with best-in-class partners. Easy to say. Tough to do.

Second, make tough choices about what you are truly good at. The test is can you kill stuff? Can you decide when stuff isn't going to hunt and when you're going to move on and invest and go deep on the things that actually have market relevance? We killed a