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“If you want to be successful, be maniacally boring,” said Ed Zander, CEO of Motorola, in a GSB-sponsored interview with Kevin Maney, contributing editor to Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine, at Gleacher Center October 8. Zander said success comes from executing such basics as supply structure, cost structure, manufacturing, platforming, and having a variety of products that come out on time.
He likened Motorola’s past innovations - dyno tech, micro tech, star tech, and push-to-talk - to home runs, and its Razr mobile phone to a “grand slam.”
“You can’t hit a grand slam every time you come to bat,” Zander said, nor does he wish that for Motorola - not every consumer wants all features, and across-the-board price points must be met.
“I’m convinced they’ll hit a home run again, because they have hit five,” he said of his employees. “I’m trying to get them to hit a lot of singles and doubles this next time around.”
He said innovation doesn’t start at the top. “It happens with small teams. It happens with smart people. It happens in places you never expect it to happen.”
Motorola, whose mobile-device business comprises half of its total business, recently passed on the chance to buy Navteq, which makes mapping systems. Maney asked why.
Zander explained that Motorola does not want to get into the same business as its customers, such as wireless carriers like Verizon, by owning applications systems.
In fact, customer satisfaction is literally number one on Motorola’s list of values. A card that Zander has been known to carry reads, “Customers, Innovation, Principles, Performance, One Motorola.”
Such emphasis on customer satisfaction was fostered back when Zander flipped burgers at Buddy Burgers on Long Island, New York. The boss occasionally would spot check the bin of wrapped burgers. If one happened to be cold, all of them would be tossed and the cooks would be docked, Zander said.
“It still sticks with me in terms of how to get the job done right,” Zander said. “I still start and stop with the customer.”
He said customer satisfaction at Motorola has evolved from bashings into bravos, particularly as evidenced by reports back from Verizon.
Zander said when it comes to the manufacture and design of products, the image of a CEO’s power is sometimes “overrated.” Mostly, the job of CEO is about leadership, he said, about getting employees to “think about beating all our competitors.” On the aforementioned card, after Performance, is the phrase, “We’re here to win,” a statement some within the company judged as too aggressive, Zander said.
“Your employees have to believe that we can win,” Zander said. “It may take a while. We may have a setback. We just had one this year in the mobile cell phone business. But you can still drive towards being a winner.”
Zander, who became CEO of Motorola in 2004, concedes that the leadership path hasn’t always been easy. A priority was getting the company into the black.
Zander was then approached by major Motorola stockholder Carl Icahn, who wanted a distribution to shareholders to get stock prices back up, Zander said. His approach was based on the belief that “in tech, you don’t go leveraging your balance sheet.”
Ryan Granner, second-year GSB student, said Zander showed “an understanding of how to focus” a business. “The key to success is knowing who you are and what you are and then executing that,” Granner said. “The successful [CEOs] get that right. The unsuccessful ones can have a death by a thousand cuts.”
– Mary Sue Penn