Burns

$25.8 billion American Express recently announced that Ursula Burns, senior corporate vice president of business group operations with Xerox, has been elected to its board of directors. Named by Fortune magazine as one of America's "most powerful black executives" in 2002, Burns has been with $15.7 billion Xerox since 1980 in a variety of engineering and management positions. According to Fortune, Burns made her mark when Xerox was at the height of its financial troubles, persuading it to outsource manufacturing. An executive board member at Boston Scientific and PQ Corp., she joins an American Express board that includes Bristol-Myers Squibb CEO Peter Dolan, former Dow Chemical CEO Frank Popoff, and Cardinal Health CEO Robert Walter.