Q&A WITH MOTOROLA'S GALVIN
Christopher B. Galvin, Motorola Inc.'s chief executive and the grandson of founder Paul Galvin, is struggling to remake the electronics giant. Galvin, 48, took the top post in January, 1997, just as Motorola's status as a technology titan began to slip. While new digital pagers buzzed incessantly on his office coffee table, the usually press-shy Galvin talked to correspondent Roger O. Crockett about why he thinks his turnaround plan will keep Motorola from going haywire.
Q: Motorola has been proclaiming a turnaround for at least a year. Why should we believe it now?
A: We began this stage of the corporation's renewal with a plan that we had to move up a bit because of the [Asian economic crisis]. It has been made a little more difficult with the economic circumstance that we're in. But we are proceeding ahead because we believe it will work.... We are as impatient as everyone else is, and we're working extraordinarily hard and driving change as fast as we can.
Q: How will you measure success?
A: We aspire to be No. 1 in all of our businesses. Some have been able to achieve it, and others have achieved second or third place. But every entity is seeking to be the best in that segment.
Q: What are your financial goals?
A: It's hard to talk in specifics, but our overall corporate portfolio objectives are to grow at 15% a year, to achieve 13% to 15% return on net assets. [Motorola's growth rate was 6.4% in 1997.]
Q: There hass been speculation that your job depends on getting the company back on track by next year. Has the board set a deadline for you?
A: It seems to me that with other large companies that are in either renewal or restructuring or turnaround circumstances, very seldom do people think of doing this in a quarter or so. Generally, people speak of making changes in Fortune 500 companies over a period of years.... We have a large, complex organization, and we're trying to get all the pistons firing right at the same time. So I think it's only practical to have time to work with those issues.
Q: How much time?
A: To some degree, much is within our own control--leadership of product, leadership of execution, leadership of managing costs, leadership of our people, creating partnerships outside the company. Also, the world economic situation will affect the rate of change. So it will take some time, a year or two, to work our way through all the issues. But we intend to demonstrate improvement as we go along.
Q: Why won't Motorola have new digital phones by the holiday shopping season?
A: When we had the communications businesses separated into paging and cellular phones, they were highly focused on those markets. Now, we've brought the entire communications business together so we can reprioritize the investment to make sure it goes on those propositions the marketplace says are most important. We believe that will solve the problem.
Q: Motorola has had a series of missteps. Can the company execute this time?
A: People will find those places in a large, complex company where either we made a mistake or structured the approach wrong. Those are the things that are easy to talk about. The majority of the company is executing very well. A lot of people say, "Why don't you have this one version of a phone?" That doesn't mean the rest of the company isn't executing superbly. From a technology on-time basis, execution is taking place across the company hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times.
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