Strategy's Heart & Soul

“There's no question what Wall Street thinks about Motorola's new co-chief executive, Sanjay Jha. The communications conglomerate's shares jumped 11% to nearly $10 on Aug. 4 after announcing the former Qualcomm chief operating officer would take the reins of Motorola's mobile-phone business. Jha brings loads of industry experience and extensive familiarity with wireless investors, ending the Schaumburg, Ill. company's five-month search for an executive to head the troubled cell-phone unit. ‘He is the perfect guy for Motorola,’ says Mark McKechnie, an analyst with American Technology Research... ‘If anyone can turn this handset division around, it's Sanjay Jha.’

“Still, for all of Jha's experience, he faces one huge challenge: Motorola's corporate culture. For the cell-phone unit to recover, Jha will have to fully cleanse Motorola of its sluggish, bureaucratic ways and teach a company that has long let engineers drive product development to think more like marketers, in tune with consumer tastes. It's a challenge that has proved insurmountable for several top Motorola executives…

“Every CEO who has run the company since Gary Tooker took over in 1993 has attempted to infuse the company with more entrepreneurial DNA. Under Edward Zander, who left in December, Motorola managed to hasten the production of a new slim phone, which became the spectacularly successful Razr. But leadership could not keep pace when consumers turned their attention away from hardware to an increasing focus on the software that bestows new functionality on phones...

“Jha, an engineer by training, sounds hesitant to overhaul the company's deep-rooted engineering culture, however. ‘I think the engineering culture is a tremendous asset to Motorola,’ he told BusinessWeek in an interview. ‘I think the challenge is to make that culture stay in tune with the marketplace. When it's a problem is when it gets disconnected with the marketplace. And my job is to keep it connected.’”

(“Motorola: The New CEO's Real Challenge; Co-CEO Sanjay Jha has strong experience in wireless, but his most important task is dismantling the mobile-phone unit's bureaucratic culture.” Roger O. Crockett and Olga Kharif. businessweek.com: August 5, 2008)

ALL ACTION, ALL CHANGE, all strategy comes from our foundational beliefs about the way things are and the way things work, and from our values and priorities.

When shared norms exist around these beliefs and values, there will be either inertia or potency, recalcitrance or revolution, momentum or initiative.

But it all begins in the heart and soul of the firm, begging the question, "Is the CEO in touch?"