Xerox CEO Steven Bandrowczak started his career working on the Long Island Railroad while attending college part-time. At #FortuneCOOSummit, Bandrowczak shared that he was disowned by his family at the age of 16, and then spent 10 years working to earn a two-year degree.
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00:00I'm a, you know, a rags to success story. I grew up, got disowned by my family at 16,
00:06was going from garbage to garbage, scraps and getting enough money that I can get gas,
00:11put it into a car and I can go to a two-year school at night while I was working full-time.
00:15I worked on the Long Island Railroad and then ultimately got to this career. And so
00:19that progression gives you a sense of, I can go through anything.
00:23Took you 10 years?
00:24Took me 10 years to get my two-year degree because I'm working at night part-time.
00:28During that progression, you know, you learn an awful lot. You learn an awful lot about
00:32hard work, resilience, but more importantly, I don't fear anything. I don't fear anything. So
00:37as we're going through a transition and we think about hard times and the things we got to go
00:41through, because I've had that background and a lot of the team around me have had a very similar
00:46background, there's nothing that we fear. And so we don't worry about the quarter over quarter
00:50challenges. We don't worry about the challenges when you're going through a reinvention. I always
00:54say this, and I said this publicly, reinvention is difficult, okay? And the hardest part is the
00:59second half of the reinvention, which is what we're starting right now, literally. But when you lay out
01:03everything that we've done to date, whether it's around how we changed our largest activists on our
01:08board, how we changed the board, how we donated Palo Alto Research Center, two recent acquisitions,
01:1430% of our revenue will come from non-print over the next 24 months. All the things that we're doing,
01:20growing in IT solutions in areas that people never would have thought of us as cyber security,
01:25security as a service, all those things you have to transition your company. If you've got any fear
01:30and you worry about quarter over quarter challenges, you'll never get through it.