Introduction by Anne M. Mulcahy, Chairman and CEO of Xerox Corporation ix
Foreword by Joel Podolny, Dean, Yale School of Management xv
1 Early Years 1
2 Peggy 13
3 The Thirties 19
4 Years of Struggle 29
5 Chet Carlson 39
6 Battelle 51
7 Contact—Just Barely 57
8 Sol Linowitz 67
9 Toward Xerox 79
10 The University 97
11 Worst of Times, Best of Times 111
12 Joe Wilson 131
13 IBM, RCA, and GE 135
14 Gathering Strength in Finance 147
15 Building the Organization 157
16 Going International 177
17 Going It Alone 191
18 5¢ 199
19 The 914 209
20 Go! 225
21 Getting on Message 239
22 Xerox: Zoom-Zoom 259
23 Fuji-Xerox 267
24 Challenges of Success 275
25 Minister Florence 289
26 Life 301
27 Public Service 315
28 Winding Down 325
29 No Longer CEO 337
30 At the Rockefellers’ 353
Afterword 359
Joe Wilson: In His Own Words 371
Acknowledgments 377
Index 381
CHARLES D. ELLIS is a recognized expert on business management. For thirty years, he was managing partner of Greenwich Associates, the leading worldwide strategy consultant to the financial services industry, which he founded and where he developed close working relationships with senior executives at most of the major investment firms in North America, Asia, and Europe. His other activities include teaching the Investment Management course at both Yale School of Management and Harvard Business School; chairing CFA Institute, the investment professionals' organization; serving as a Director of Vanguard; advising some of the world's largest investing institutions; and chairing the investment committees at the Whitehead Institute and Yale University. He is one of ten individuals recognized by the investment profession for lifetime leadership. Among his eleven prior books is Capital: The Story of Long-Term Investment Excellence (Wiley).
"An inspiring biography" (The Economist, November 2006) If you run
a business and aspire to make it great, you owe it to yourself to
read Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox by Charles D. Ellis.
Despite occasionally pedestrian writing, the book rewards the
reader with dramatic accounts of how one great leader managed to
influence change rather than just react to it.
Wilson knew little about technology, yet he--not the brilliant
techies with whom he surrounded himself--created the modern copier
industry. Xerox was an old Rochester, N.Y., company that was small,
obscure and unambitious until Wilson took over from his dad in the
late 1940s. In a sense, his takeover kicked off the technology
revolution that shook American industry out of its somnolence.
Early investors with small stakes in Xerox became
multimillionaires. Later investors lost billions looking for the
"next Xerox." They would have done better searching for the next
Joe Wilson.
His tact and lack of ego held together a necessarily diverse bunch
of people. Sol Linowitz, the company lawyer, upstaged him by
letting it be said on national television that he, not Wilson, was
the father of Xerox. Wilson ignored it: Linowitz was important to
the company, and Wilson wanted success, not an ego massage. He
grasped the importance of image. He pioneered new and novel ways to
get public attention for Xerox, including backing public-service TV
shows at a time when the company could barely afford the expense in
order to convey an image of quality for a little-known brand.
When a leading consulting firm told Xerox there was no real market
for its proposed 412 xerography machine, Wilson and his aides took
the report apart and discovered that the questions asked and the
methodology were faulty. He plowed on.
The 412, Xerox's first truly competitive product, would have to
sell for $47,000 and was far too big for salespeople to lug around.
Who would, or could, write a check of this size for a mere copying
machine? But hey, someone suggested, who wouldn't pay a nickel to
get rid of the messy carbon copy that was the curse of every office
at the time? Wilson didn't hesitate: a nickel a copy it would be.
Customers loved the seemingly cheap price, and orders mounted and
remounted for the 412. To the customer's surprise and Xerox's
delight, users were making far more copies of things than they did
before the 412. The machine was so clean, fast and precise, it was
an easy way to expand internal communication in the days before
e-mail. In a year, some customers were spending more for copies
than the machine would have cost. Xerox became a cash jackpot
machine.
Ellis's generally upbeat book has a sad ending. On his retirement
in the mid-1960s, an ailing and tired Wilson made two horrible
mistakes: He picked an incompetent successor and then failed to
bequeath a strong board that could have reined in his successor's
blunders. His successor threw away the chance to own the coming
personal computer revolution and made disastrous billion-dollar
investments in old industries. He lacked his predecessor's knack
for embracing change. By then, Wilson was too ill to retake the
reins. Xerox shriveled, and its bonds sank to junk status. Rescued
by the present CEO, Ann Mulcahy, Xerox is doing well again, but it
is no longer the shining symbol Wilson created.
The author, Charley Ellis, is retired head of the consulting firm
Greenwich Associates and serves as a Yale trustee and a director of
the Vanguard funds. He knows a lot about business leadership,
having consulted for and worked with many of the best
practitioners. Among all of the business leaders he's known, and
he's known hundreds, he puts Joe Wilson--whom he never met--over
them all. The lessons here are clear and shining--both the good and
the bad. (Forbes.com, October 25, 2006) Transforming family-owned
Haloid Corp., which struggled in the shadow of hometown behemoth
Eastman Kodak, into the globally recognized Xerox is an amazing
accomplishment. But as Ellis's biography of Joe Wilson attests,
Wilson's achievements ranged more widely and went much deeper than
many gave him credit for. Ellis, author of 11 books and former
financial industry consultant offers a heartfelt, if not artful,
telling of the CEO's life story. He contends that Wilson embodied
all of the qualities that leadership management books celebrate:
integrity, foresight and the ability to inspire people to perform.
He credits these attributes to helping Wilson so spectacularly
realize his vision for his company; its employees; his alma mater,
the University of Rochester; and the city and people of Rochester,
N.Y. Ellis's telling starts off slow and is initially quite
repetitive. But once Xerox is finally born, after years of
setbacks, the story picks up. The real purpose for the detailed
buildup appears toward the end, when credit for the last 20-odd
years of corporate strife and ultimate success is given to the
wrong person, Wilson's best friend and the company's corporate
counsel. At that point, it becomes clear why Ellis was compelled to
write this book so long after the company's rise and its true
founder's demise.(Sept.) (Publishers Weekly, July 17, 2006)
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