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Xerox Management Close-Up

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Xerox Management Close-up Xerox CEO, Anne Mulcahy had her hands full when she took on the responsibility of fixing Xerox’s debt problems. Even though she did not know how to fix everything, she made it a point to educate herself on the unknown subjects and began to find a way to fix them. Not only does Anne Mulcahy show what it means to be a leader, she also showed what it meant to have great managerial skills. This paper is going to discuss what it took for Anne Mulcahy to fix Xerox. Despite the massive $18-billioin debt Xerox had accumulated, Anne Mulcahy had a vision and a plan to save the company she loved. In order to achieve her goals, she needed to get her co-workers on board, as well. In order to get her co-workers on board, she needed to have a well thought out plan of action. Anne recognized there was a massive debt looming over her company, and she also recognized that Xerox was about to go under. Despite the negative remarks people gave to Anne for trying to fix the company, she went ahead and fixed it. By doing so, Anne saved thousands of jobs. Before Anne Mulcahy became CEO, the previous CEO had put the company further in debt. His managerial skills were faulty because there was a lack of structure and there must have been a large amount of uncertainty. This can be assumed because he had only lasted 13 months as CEO. When there is a lack of structure and uncertainty, there will always be conflict. The conflict here is that the old CEO had done nothing to fix Xerox’s debt problem, did nothing to help Xerox grow, and instead, was a key cause in the near death of Xerox. When Anne became CEO, she had already proven herself as a leader as she was in charge of a $6-billion project that was a success. In order to save the company, she had to make programmed and nonprogrammed decisions. According to Bateman and Snell (2011), programmed decisions are

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