The World Wide World: IT Ain't Just the Web ... - Cdn.oreilly.com

CEO-designate of Lenovo, faces the challenges of integrating two separate companies
and cultures while assuring two customer bases that nothing good will be lost. In some
ways, wrenching change can help people adjust, since there’s no question of the necessity;
part of the challenge of globalizing a corporate culture is getting the folks at home to
realize that change is a must. Anne Mulcahy of Xerox, who has spent more time with her
current employer than any other speaker on the roster save Bruce Holmes (and probably
than most of the audience), was also “lucky” enough to get clear signals of the need for
change from the worldwide market as she brought Xerox through a wrenching turnaround.
For Xerox, the culture change has been back toward its roots of innovation and
informality – roots that had been somewhat obscured during a long period of success.
Likewise, Jonathan Schwartz of Sun still faces a challenging market, but Sun has successfully
spread its R&D as well as its sales efforts across the world.
Anne Mulcahy, Xerox: It’s the (global) culture, stupid!
Anne Mulcahy joined Xerox in 1976 – around the time PC Forum was created, she
notes.“I don’t know what the first PC Forum was like,” she says,“but Xerox is very
different from the company that trained me to sell copiers 29 years ago. The growth
of global markets has been one of the most powerful forces for change at Xerox.”
Xerox has 58,100 employees worldwide. About half the company’s nearly $16 billion
in revenues comes from the US, and the other half mostly from Europe and developing
markets. In addition, the Fuji-Xerox joint venture in Asia generates about $9.5
billion. Yet, Mulcahy notes, “There’s a big difference between being ‘international’
and being ‘global.’ We’re still not where we need to be in that journey, but we’re making
progress. It’s not enough to say you operate in more than 140 countries around
the world. You have to change the way you think about everything from R&D to
manufacturing, from your supply chain to sales and marketing, from service to
billing. Talking about it is a lot easier than doing it.”
She’s proud of Xerox’s history: “Xerox technology democratized publishing and
made it easy and inexpensive for businesses, organizations and communities of any
size to reproduce information, customize it and personalize it. Behind the Iron
Curtain, Xerox machines were literally locked up and guarded to prevent unauthorized
publishing. When AlphaGraphics opened the first quick-print shop in Moscow
in the early 1990s, that was big news.” (We were there and it was indeed a big deal.)
Mulcahy had some experience overseas in the mid-1990s when she ran customer
operations outside the US. But, she adds,“The global nature of our business really hit
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