Anne M. Mulcahy did some radical things on Memorial Day weekend. She saw her son Kevin in a track meet. She had a facial. She invited friends over for dinner. In between, she recalls, she "just hung out."
Nothing radical in that? Consider that it was the first time in two years that Mulcahy, chief of Xerox Corp, had spent a full weekend without working.
Indeed, since May 2000, when Xerox ousted G. Richard Thoman as chief executive and named Mulcahy, then in her 24th year with the company, as president, she has been like a mother glued to the bedside of a child in intensive care, often in the office as early as 6am, rarely out before 7pm, and continuing to make phone calls from home.
"Even I've been amazed at the sheer level of activity she's maintained," said Thomas J. Dolan, a longtime Xerox executive and her older brother.
But the devotion has paid off. It landed her the chief executive's job in August 2001, and the chairwoman's job five months later. And it helped pull Xerox back from the brink of bankruptcy.
Mulcahy, 49, negotiated the settlement of a long investigation of Xerox's accounting methods by the Securities and Exchange Commission. She sold longtime Xerox businesses, including the ink-jet printer business she had nurtured. She introduced products and services that analysts say may finally nudge Xerox's stagnant revenue higher. She presided over the resignation last year of Barry D. Romeril as chief financial officer. Last week, she and the board announced his replacement, Lawrence A. Zimmerman, an IBM veteran.
The upshot is that Xerox, while still weak, is off the critical list, and Mulcahy can ease up. "I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, but yes, this job and my life, they're both getting to be more fun," she said, chatting last week in her office here. "We've got a lot more to do, but finally, we're not in crisis."
Xerox certainly still ails. It must fight off attacks by Canon and Ricoh in its market for superfast commercial printers, and find a way to chip at Hewlett-Packard's dominance in slower, cheaper printers. It must fight IBM and other computer makers for a share of the lucrative market for electronic data services. It must still find a company to buy equity in Xerox PARC, the Palo Alto research center that Xerox can no longer afford to maintain itself. In the next month or so, it must provide the SEC with restated numbers from past years and assure shareholders that it has come up with more acceptable accounting methods for future ones.
All told, Xerox has yet to find a good way to accomplish those three most basic of business tasks: increasing sales, turning a profit and getting the stock price up. "When it comes to executing growth strategies, Xerox is just not firing on all cylinders yet," said James W. Lundy, a former Xerox executive now a vice president of Gartner Inc., a technology research firm.
Still, even Lundy, who once said that only a transfusion of fresh blood could save Xerox, is acknowledging that maybe, just maybe, Mulcahy wasn't so wrong for the top job after all. "I'll give her a B-plus, maybe even an A-minus, for engineering one great turnaround," he said.
Competitors, too, offer newfound respect. "Anne has gotten Xerox out of some really tough financial situations," said Jim Ivy, the president of the Ricoh Office Products Group.
RSS