Libertyville, Illinois: Sanjay Jha’s honeymoon as co-chief executive at Motorola Inc. lasted just a few minutes into his first meeting with employees in 2008.
“Why should we trust you?” one employee blurted. The frustration was understandable. Motorola, which pioneered cellphones and built such consumer favourites as the StarTac and the Razr, had not had a hit phone in years, and a succession of leaders could not find one.
Crucial milestone: Motorola Inc co-chief executive officer Sanjay Jha. Motorola’s Droid is the first phone to use the latest release of Google’s mobile operating system Android, dubbed Eclair. Ryan Anson / Bloomberg
Jha, 46, an engineer who worked his way up at Qualcomm Inc. from a chip designer to the No. 3 executive, answered the challenge, saying employees should not take him on faith but watch what he did.
Jha knew he had to act fast to slash costs and prune dozens of phones that were based on dead-end technology that simply were not profitable. That made the last several months of 2008 a financial disaster—losses doubled as sales fell by one-third.
“If I didn’t have smart phones in the market for Christmas of ’09, this business wouldn’t have a runway,” he said.
Jha does not have Motorola flying again, but he at least has it poised for a takeoff. On Wednesday, Verizon Wireless introduced Motorola’s new Droid smart phone, which is nearly as thin as an iPhone but with a bigger screen and a slide-out keyboard. T-Mobile has started selling another Motorola smart phone called the Cliq.
“Motorola is a different place than it was a year ago,” said Paul E. Cole, T-Mobile’s vice-president for product development. “Sanjay has done a spectacular job.”
Looking back, Jha said that Motorola was in worse shape than he knew when he took the job, largely because of a dysfunctional management culture that missed the shift in consumer preferences from phones designed primarily for talking to those that do nearly everything a computer can do. The firm’s engineering talent, which had once developed great phones, remained intact, he said.
As luck would have it, one of those engineers, Rick Osterloh, grabbed Jha just as he stepped off the stage at that first town meeting in August 2008. Jha had mentioned Google’s Android operating system for smart phones. Osterloh rushed the stage to tell him he was working on an Android phone in Motorola’s Silicon Valley outpost that would bring together text messages, email and social-network updates.
By the end of that week, Osterloh was sitting on the corporate jet, flying with Jha back to California and explaining the Android concept in detail.
“He was able to understand what we were doing at such a detailed level. I was very impressed,” Osterloh said.