When Xerox CEO Steve Bandrowczak mentors aspiring business leaders, he starts with a reality check. While executives always feel ready for the next role, he said at Fortune’s 2025 COO Summit, “the reality is, once you’re in that seat, dramatically different.”
Bandrowczak, who became CEO in 2023 following the sudden death of predecessor John Visentin, had spent five years as Xerox’s COO. He was a seasoned operator, former CIO, and had sat in countless board and committee meetings. But when the top job became his, he realized the true nuance and intensity of the CEO role.
“COOs drive change. COOs make cultural shifts, drive outputs,” Bandrowczak explains. “The difference as a CEO is you’re now the leader, the face of the company. So you’ve got to be able to drive the culture with shareholders, with employees, with partners, but more importantly, understanding things that you did not know, and the admission of the things that you did not know.”
The leap from second-in-command to the top job requires leaders to step into a new identity concurrent to their operational know-how. Building a board, he says, is not the same as working with one, and presenting to a committee doesn’t prepare executives for total ownership.
To prepare for the transition, Bandrowczak encourages aspiring CEOs to attend leadership and board courses. Bandrowczak, who teaches rising executives, says his first message to students is to get comfortable being uncomfortable.
His path from a young man disowned by his family, working nights to pay for college, to leading a multi-billion-dollar enterprise has given him a mindset built for conquering adversity. Leading a company, according to Bandrowczak, isn’t about having all the answers: It’s about having the resilience to ask better questions and the courage to embrace change with excitement.
“Today is the slowest that change will ever be in our life, and you can either be fearful of change or be excited about change,” he says.
Bandrowczak sees the rapid evolution of AI not as a threat, but as a once-in-a-generation opportunity to reshape industries. At Xerox, he says, the technology has prompted the company to think about changing the way it works with data, the modernization of print, and diversifying revenue through its growing IT business.
“Today is the greatest opportunity you may ever have,” he adds.
But navigating disruption also takes self-awareness. “You own your destiny,” he says. “Look in the mirror. If you don’t like what’s there, you’ve got to change it.”