Who Should Lead Motorola's (MOT) Turnaround?

From what I have heard of Garriques while at Motorla, he is a real piece of work with many racial and sexual comments to employees. He is a real piece of work. I am sure Dell would love to get rid of him by now.

Interesting! Any MOT employees out there with some insight?

@me2: Deleted your comment. Keep it clean, folks.

You folks really hit the '80s brick cell phone clip art jackpot today, didn't you?

NOT Ron Garriques. MOT is the way it now, in part due to him. Never delivered on any of the concepts / platforms that were viable and profitable.

Robbie Bach? Really? Well then, why not Jay Allard then? He's got a little more experience managing consumer electronic brands at MSFT than Bach thanks to the two Xbox launches and Zune.

How do you imagine ANY of those hypothetical candidates would fix Moto's #1 problem -- their inability since the Razr to create an organization that knows how to come up with a killer new mobile device design every couple years?

Nokia has done just fine without a "killer new mobile device design" ... pretty much ever. So it's possible.

Ron Garriques candidacy going down in flames. Two anonymous comments:

Fact: Ron Garriques' Market Strategy as President of Motorola's Cell Phone Sector: lower the price of the Razor really fast to lead in market share! Yes, turn this high class product into an everyday event. Time would prove this philosophy a major stratgical mistake.

Fact: Ron Garriques failed to stimulate his organization to follow up the Razor with an equal or better product.

Fact: Very few who worked for Ron Garriques in the Cell Phone Division remains at Motorola today. The sector under him, collapsed.

Fact: Ron Garriques jumped ship to Dell when it started sinking.

He'd make a great candidate/leader for Motorola's turnaround. Right.

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Ron Garriques? Surely you jest. Garriques was very much responsible for the downfall of The Razor at Motorola in it's prime. Ask anyone who worked for him. He lowered prices too fast on The Razor and was lame to stimulate the development of a new device to follow the Razor. And when things started turning really bad, he walked away to Dell.

You best do your homework before you hand the cell phone division back to this egotistic clown.

The RAZR was developed while Galvin was the CEO and Dick Lynch run mobile devices. Ron Garriques, who was running Europe at the time riding the success of the triplets, initially thought the phone was ugly.

When Zander came and appointed Garriques to lead mobile devices, Ron changed his mind about the RAZR. He then brought in a legion of Mckinsey consultants who created with him a plan to be "number 1 in 1000 days." It was based on the stupid idea of superficial, brown-nosing consultants that MOT could compete with NOK across the portfolio, including the low end, without addressing fundamental issues such as the silicon and software platforms. Ron never had the leadership to decide what to do to replace MOT's stone age software platform, a piece of spaghetti code called P2K. It is one of the main reasons why MOT is always late with products, cannot efficiently support carrier branded services and runs at a higher cost than NOK.

When he realized that the ship was sinking, Garriques jumped to Dell with a very sweet deal. Apparently he is hated there!

Ironically, I guess the 1000 days (to become number 1) are to be completed sometime around now. Has anyone asked McKinsey to give back the millions of dollars MOT paid, after all their plans failed?

Of course not. What has happened is that the same McKinsey guys are now the "external neutral advisers" suggesting to Greg Brown that he spins off the mobile devices business. The problem is that to fix this business you dont need just to change management and culture. You need to create a fundamental software capability at scale that the company just does not have. And it is very, very difficult to do. It requires massive investment and it has material likelihood of failing. And while you do that NOK, Samsung, Apple, and RIM are not sitting waiting.

I feel sorry for many good people at MOT. But Garriques and his consultants have actually more blame for what has happened than Zander. Zander's was a sin of omission (he trusted Ron and did not act). Garriqus was just plain incompetent and opportunistic (jumping ship when he saw it was going to sink!)

These so called executives are all totally wrong. Motorola needs one thing. A smart software executive. Everyone else in the mobile business has been a failure. Even nokia's DNA is not right, despite their success.

Me. I would take Kevin Lynch, CTO at adobe. He came from macromedia, and is the person responsible for the best software stack on the internet and the best long term strategy.

Phones are not about hardware any more. Its about software.