Motorola Split Upstaged by Insider Rant
Say your company is on the ropes and you launch a major initiative to grab headlines and show you're serious about turning things around. The last thing you want is someone stealing your thunder.
That's the situation faced by Motorola, the tech giant that said Wednesday it's splitting up into two companies. One will sell the mobile handsets that have pretty much carried its brand this decade, and the other will be dedicated to everything else: cable TV set tops, two-way radios, network equipment, etc.
Motorola issued a PR release with its new CEO Greg Brown saying all the bland and anodyne things a good CEO is obliged to:
"Creating two industry-leading companies will provide improved flexibility, more tailored capital structures, and increased management focus â€" as well as more targeted investment opportunities for our shareholders."Woo-hoo! But over at Engadget, they got a hold of a letter from an angry insider, written last month but broadcast at a very inconvenient moment for Motorola. Numair Faraz, who reported to Motorola's chief marketing officer Geoffrey Frost until his sudden death a 55 in 2005, ripped Motorola a new power socket in an overnight classic of insider venting.
As I told Zander in a phone call in 2007, I felt that he was setting the company up for massive failure. He had the audacity to say, "Well, maybe Geoffrey should have come up with a better successor to the RAZR," and told me to "Wait for big things in 2008." I guess he was right -- the golden parachute he got for his exit from the company was worth about 30 million dollars -- and that doesn't include his accumulated Motorola stock.The outlines of Faraz' complaints are harsh. He says former CEO Ed Zander cared more about his golf score than running a company, and accused him of working Frost to death. In the end, Motorola opened up its doors to that virus Carl Icahn - who can't successfully raid a company unless its mistakes are all wrapped up, put in a basket and placed on his front porch.
Engadget says it held onto the scathing letter until it could look into it matters a bit, but if found some things to justify the bitterness:
In researching the myriad claims raised in this letter -- which we believe to be true -- we also discovered a number of other unsettling things about Motorola's corporate past in the last five years, such as certain gross corporate excesses demanded by Zander and his inner circle (like a small fleet of extravagant private jets, where most companies that size might only have one, if any), or the fact that Motorola's current CEO, Greg Brown, is so technologically out of touch he refuses to use a computer for communications, and has all his email correspondences printed by his secretary and replied to by dictation.Memo to old-school tech executives in 2008: You can still spin a restructuring, but know it can be unspun from inside. And don't be surprised if someone - journalist or blogger - fact checks it. Cutting your losses when an aggressive investor attacks used to mean slashing jobs and pushing remaining workers that much harder. Now it's more complicated: those workers can easily fight back.
Oh, and learn to type your own emails.