In June 2025, Xerox CEO Steve Bandrowczak sat down with Fortune Magazine to share his leadership philosophy. His message was one of unbridled optimism and personal empowerment:
“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.”
“Today is the greatest opportunity you may ever have.”
“You own your destiny. Look in the mirror. If you don’t like what’s there, you’ve got to change it.”
Inspiring words from a Fortune 500 CEO. But what happens when we examine what “owning your destiny” looks like for the stakeholders whose lives are shaped by his leadership decisions?
The Reality Behind the Rhetoric
For Shareholders: An 80% Cut to “Destiny”
Within days of these optimistic statements, Xerox’s Board approved an 80% dividend cut in May 2025, reducing quarterly payments from $0.125 to $0.025 per share. For shareholders who had been receiving meaningful income from their investment, this wasn’t exactly the “greatest opportunity” the CEO described.
Xerox shares plunged 15% after-hours following the dividend cut announcement, wiping out millions in shareholder value. The company’s official rationale? “Reducing our dividend creates greater financial flexibility to deploy cash in the most accretive manner” – corporate speak for prioritizing management’s acquisition strategy over shareholder income.
For Employees: “Change” Means Job Loss
The CEO’s advice to “be excited about change” takes on a different meaning when you consider that Xerox eliminated 15% of its workforce – approximately 3,600 employees – as part of restructuring efforts. The company spent $112 million in restructuring costs during 2024, a significant expense that ultimately meant thousands of people lost their livelihoods.
For these employees, “owning your destiny” became a matter of finding new employment after corporate decisions eliminated their positions.
For Customers: Destiny Hijacked by Corporate Negligence
Here’s where this story gets personal. MTWX exists because of what happened to one customer—one business owner—and what Xerox did after they made a mistake.
In September 2022, a small business discovered that Xerox had taken a critical piece of leased production equipment—without advance notice. When the business owner contacted Xerox for clarification, they learned the company had sent the legal termination notice to the wrong address entirely. Not a unit number off. Not a misspelling. A completely different location—an address where the company had never operated.
The business owner received no advance notice that equipment would be retrieved. The termination notice was misaddressed, and they were never informed that Xerox would be coming to take the equipment.
When the error was brought to their attention, Xerox ignored that it had occurred—refused to accept responsibility. Instead of acknowledging their mistake or attempting to remedy the situation, they doubled down, demanding payment and imposing $3,500 in retroactive fees. These included charges for toner that they had billed for under the service agreement but never actually supplied.
At a time when every hour of uptime mattered for that business, they were left without the tools they needed to survive—because a billion-dollar company made a preventable error and then refused to correct it.
This wasn’t a dispute over equipment maintenance.
This was a structural failure in corporate accountability, made worse by the legal machinery that backed it.
And from that failure, MTWX was born—not as a customer complaint forum, but as a movement to hold corporations accountable when their conduct crosses legal, moral, and ethical lines.
The Leadership Philosophy Problem
When “Fearlessness” Becomes Stakeholder Fear
Bandrowczak told Fortune:
“Leading a company 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.”
But let’s ask a better question: Who actually gets to “embrace” change?
The executive suite? With its golden parachutes, equity grants, and media spin?
Or the employees who get a severance check and a pink slip?
Or the small business owner gasping to restore operations after a corporate blunder?
The Privilege of Optimism
Optimism is a privilege. And it’s most freely expressed by those who don’t suffer the consequences of their own decisions.
When a CEO tells you to “look in the mirror” and change what you don’t like, it presumes that you have control. But in the Xerox universe:
Shareholders didn’t get to control the dividend cut
Employees didn’t get to vote on the layoffs
Customers didn’t get to correct a misaddressed letter that led to loss of business operations
Only corporate leadership “owns their destiny.” Everyone else just pays for it.
When Leadership Forgets What Business Is
Simon Sinek once said: “People make things. People buy things. Take care of those two groups, and everything else takes care of itself.”
At Xerox, leadership forgot that:
The people who made their products—the 3,600 they laid off—were the ones creating value
The people who bought their services—the customer left scrambling without equipment—were the reason they existed in the first place
No quarterly earnings call can undo the erosion of trust that happens when corporations treat people as collateral damage in a PR-driven transformation.
The Accountability Gap
This isn’t just about Xerox. It’s about a corporate pattern—reflected across industries—where executives speak the language of empowerment while distributing the consequences of failure to everyone but themselves.
And it raises urgent questions:
Who holds leaders accountable when their decisions are out of sync with reality?
What recourse exists when corporate messaging masks structural harm?
How do we force systems to face the cost of their own decisions?
What MTWX Is Here to Do
MTWX wasn’t founded to write angry reviews. It was created to shine a light on a broader sickness in our institutions—a legal, moral, and ethical sloppiness that has become normalized.
Our mission is simple: When corporations or governments betray the public trust, we make sure they face real consequences.
That means:
Organizing the people affected
Documenting the failures
Confronting the institutions
Forcing change—through media, public pressure, and legal response
It starts with a story. But it never ends there.
Your Story Matters
Have you been affected by a company that made decisions without considering the human cost?
Have you seen a system fail—and then watched it pretend it hadn’t?
Have you been told to “own your destiny” by someone who owns the system?
Have you had something like this happen to you with Xerox? Equipment taken without proper notice? Billing disputes handled with legal intimidation? Procedural failures that cost your business time and money?
Then MTWX isn’t just for you. It needs you.
Join us. Speak up. Help write the last chapter.
👉 Join the MTWX movement today — Because accountability doesn’t come from boardrooms. It comes from us.
Visit MTWX.ca and become part of the solution.
This analysis is based on publicly available statements from Fortune Magazine interviews, official corporate announcements, and documented business communications including verified email exchanges. All information is properly attributed to original sources.