Paul Arthur Allaire is a businessman who served as CEO and Chairman of Xerox Corporation, and as a director on several other public companies.
He was first hired by Xerox in 1966.
Allaire was named CEO in 1990, succeeding David T. Kearns who retired at the mandatory age limit of 60. Allaire was elected as the company's chairman on May 29, 1991, after Kearns accepted an appointement as Secretary of Education in the administration of President George H. W. Bush. Allaire transformed the office of the president into a newly formed corporate office, with four executives dividing the responsibilities that usually fall under the president and chief operating officer. The group shared operational responsibilities for Xerox's nine worldwide business units and three worldwide geographic customer operations units. One of these four key officials was A. Barry Rand, executive vice president of operations, and one of the highest-ranking African-Americans in business at the time.
When Allaire became CEO, Xerox had billions of dollars in insurance liabilities, so he methodically disentangled the company from property and casualty insurance and other financial-services businesses. Allaire also rolled out cost-cutting and new product technology introductions, including the first digital copier-Document Center. In 1994, Allaire rebranded Xerox as "The Document Company" to signal its ambition to move far beyond copiers, as the growth of desktop computing stimulated huge increases in the number of documents being created. Under Allaire's "Leadership through Quality" program, Xerox was the first U.S. company to won back lost market share from the Japanese.
