Ed Zander was a Silicon Valley star, having been president of Sun Microsystems before joining a private equity firm. So in January 2004 when he arrived at Motorola, which was seen as a sleepy inward-looking company that had been late to the digital cell phone revolution, many experts expected him to engage in a major California-style housecleaning. “What I heard,” Zander recalls, “is that ‘You gotta come in and fire everyone and get your own team. It is easier if you bring in people you know. You’ve got someone to talk to.’”
But Zander didn’t do it that way. “It wasn’t a company that was completely fractured,” he says. He did bring in Rich Nottenburg, a friend, as chief strategy officer. But otherwise, Zander tried to identify “the keepers” from existing Motorola management. He started an extensive series of meetings with customers, hoping to make Motorola a company that was led more from the outside, i.e., customers, than from the inside. He said to himself, “Let’s start with a clean piece of paper and we’ll see what it looks like in three to six months.” It wasn’t until seven months after he took over that he took the initial step of replacing the human resources chief.
See full Article.
Posts
