Harvard Business School Alumni

Not a Regular Joe

ELLIS: Joe Wilson was a servant leader who cared about people.

PHOTO BY JEFF HACKETT

Everyone always called him Joe. But as the leader of a corporate giant, Joe Wilson wasn’t exactly a regular Joe. As detailed in Joe Wilson and the Creation of Xerox (Wiley, 2006) by Charles D. Ellis (MBA ’63), Wilson was a principled and driven executive who transformed a small company called Haloid in Rochester, New York, into one that became synonymous with photocopying. Ellis, former managing partner of Greenwich Associates, offers a portrait of a business mogul who served his community and never lost the common touch.

What drew you to the story of Joe Wilson?
He had a huge impact on my life in the most light-touch kind of way. I was an analyst working for Rockefeller Brothers and was sent to record what he said at a speech. I was a year out of HBS and still didn’t have a clear picture of what I wanted to do with my life and career. As I listened to him, I realized that he’d figured it out. He wanted to do something that was important in the social context, to be successful in the business context, and to have a deep and meaningful life.

How would you describe Wilson’s leadership?
The classic term is that he was a “servant leader.” Once a year he would go on the manufacturing floor and talk to every single person. It would take four weeks. But he remembered who they were, knew their names and faces, and remembered something about them. He really cared about people.

Wilson had many difficult years trying to bring a copier to market. What drove him to continue?
What drove Christopher Columbus to discover America? Because he didn’t know how hard it was going to be. If Wilson had known how bad it was going to be, he would not have tried it.

Do you think success changed him in any way?
No, I really don’t. He never developed those characteristics that most of us associate with success. What he did do was keep striving to add even more value.

Is Wilson’s influence still felt at Xerox today?
Anne Mulcahy is the CEO at Xerox. Wilson insisted that women be in executive and management positions. Her job really comes out of his policy statements. She is trying to re-create the Joe Wilson spirit within Xerox: Let’s create profits for ourselves because we solve problems for other people.

What can businesspeople learn from Wilson?
Develop a whole life based on your own core values and what kind of person you want to be over your lifetime. And aim to do things that are value-centered rather than profit- or income-centered.

—Lewis I. Rice