Word: zander
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Amid the chaos and crowds of Coney Island, Ed Zander learned an early lesson in the value of hustle and patience. The son of a furrier in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, Zander loved the Parachute Jump, the Silver Streak and, of course, the Cyclone. After school he and his brother would stand at the exit to Steeplechase Park for hours and charm people out of unused ride tickets, hoarding them in a rented locker. "We had, like, 3,000 free rides," Zander says. By summertime, they could spend all day in the park without ever buying a ticket...
...Zander tells the story with a baby boomer's nostalgia for his 1950s childhood and a true salesman's pride. Now CEO of Motorola, Zander, 58, doesn't hide the fact that he has tried to animate the company with his particular brand of Brooklyn moxie. He acknowledges that Motorola has a storied past. (Its engineers invented the cellular phone and the walkie-talkie, and it was one of the world's first manufacturers of semiconductors.) But in the years before Zander took over, Motorola had been losing ground to the market-leading muscle of Nokia and to the stylish...
...however, see a lack of fire. After a few disappointing quarters, some product misfires and layoffs that cut 60,000 employees, the company had become "gun-shy," Zander says. When he arrived in January 2004, he set out to change Motorola from the inside out--turning an engineer's company into a design powerhouse, an American icon into a global player and Motorola's conservative culture into one that embraces risk. As Zander puts it, "You gotta celebrate taking a swing...
...emblem of Zander's vision for a new Motorola--one that marries innovative engineering with bold design and marketing--is the Razr. Nearly a year after the wafer-thin phone was launched, sales are still accelerating. Motorola sold 6.5 million Razrs in the third quarter of 2005. In that period, the Razr accounted for 1 in 25 phones sold by any major carrier. The Razr is on track to surpass the best-selling phone of all time, Motorola's StarTAC. If that phone, the world's first clamshell, was Motorola at its geek-chic best, the Razr is just chic...
...China and South Korea are hot on Motorola's tail. When they figure out (and that is when, not if) how to make phones as cool as the Razr, there's little doubt they will produce them faster and more cheaply. Motorola's stock is up 58% since Zander took over as CEO, but it has been hovering around $20 for the past four months, despite seven straight quarters of double-digit revenue growth. The fear, as Merrill Lynch analyst Tal Liani explains it, is that despite the Razr's success, "in the long run, the company will face commoditization...