Word: zander
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That kind of hand-wringing about margins gets under Zander's skin. At an investors' conference in September where he intended to promote the Rokr, he was instead peppered with questions about how the company would shore up its profit margins once sales of the Razr start to slow. At the end of the meeting, an exasperated Zander started venting to an attendee about the evils of short-term thinking on Wall Street. "I work for shareholders," he said in an interview in his Schaumburg, Ill., office three weeks later. "But, that said, are you a long-term shareholder...
...investors willing to stick it out, Zander has a bold vision, one that focuses on the next decade's hot new country rather than the next quarter's hot new product. Even as Motorola continues to develop high-end phones, he is pushing the company to go after the lowest end of the spectrum: a sub-$40 phone aimed at farmers and the striving urban masses in India, several nations in Africa and, to a lesser extent, China. But he doesn't want to sell just cheap phones; he wants to transform those markets into a new base of customers...
India in particular is a high priority for Zander, who has made that country his personal project. His partner on the India team is Warrior, a 21-year veteran of Motorola who was born and educated in India. (Zander tried twice to recruit her to Sun when he was chief operating officer there, and a running joke at Motorola is that he took the CEO job just to work with her.) Instead of flooding India with cheap products, Warrior says, the company is introducing pared-down phones that share a design language with more expensive ones. They use the same...
Making the broad push into emerging telecom markets will require Motorola's disparate working parts--half network infrastructure, half consumer products--to work together in a way they rarely did before Zander arrived. "The leaders of the business units would have tried to optimize the business for themselves," Rau says. Under Zander, part of senior executives' compensation is now tied to Motorola's overall performance, not just that of their own units. They meet in person more often, and each of the top 14 executives is now personally responsible for two major customers or regions. Zander won't make...
Unlike many outsider CEOs, Zander kept most of the existing top managers. He did get rid of the CEO's palatial executive suite, complete with private bathroom and treadmill. With so much space, "Who do I talk to?" he asks, laughing. He now sits with the other top managers in a cluster of modest glass-fronted offices. His isn't even the largest, and his secretary gets the view. Ask Motorola executives about their CEO, and they are almost as likely to tease him--about his taste for what he calls cooked sushi or his complaints about the commute...