Carl Icahn, smelling corporate breakup blood, stepped in and in short order owned 6% of Motorola, proposing to break it it into a phone division and a public safety/security (think cop/firemen walkie-talkies) division. For Zander, the jig was essentially up: He was out in 2008. For Motorola, the jig was less immediately, but just as clearly, also up.
The spun-off phone division, “Motorola Mobility,” ended up in Google’s hands in mid-2012 for $12.5-billion, only to be sold yet again to Lenovo about 20 months later for under $3-billion. Sounds like a disaster, but many analysts actually thought Google came out ahead after all in that they kept 17,000 patents and all the engineers involved in creating them and shed a division losing a quarter of a billion dollars a year.
Be that as it may, Motorola had been broken up for parts.
The end.
The minister
About 20 years ago, a new minister was selected to run an urban parish in a formerly well-to-do city neighborhood that had fallen on hard times; crime and poverty had risen and the middle class had long since left. The city itself had been given up for nearly dead by many.
The church building (close to a century old) was without doubt architecturally impressive but, realistically larger than needed for the current congregation, and a maintenance headache. Still, the community was a diverse and ever-changing and the promise of new and slightly exotic blood—the minister found himself called to the church mid-career and had one successful professional vocation behind him—seemed ideal. From the perspective of the leadership higher up in the denomination, it might not have been clear that this church had a terribly rosy future, and the new minister represented promise.
As the years went by, the neighborhood began to gentrify, with first some relative pioneers and then an increasing tide of better-off new residents finding the local architectural infrastructure sturdy and attractive and the prices still reasonable. Followed as the night the day the immediate corollary of rising property values.
The church, with history on its side, owned a vacant piece of property in the neighborhood, which assumed more and more importance in the parish’s planning for its future, and the minister took the lead in trying to extract value from the lot. He was a forceful personality and valued getting his way.
Without going into detail—which is also at this point, speculative to try to reconstruct second-hand and years later—during the minister’s watch the church sold the vacant lot for $X-million while the market was still rising, bought it back (still vacant) from that same purchaser a few years later for about two and a half times $X-million, and then entered into a putative agreement with a developer who never developed anything. It required litigation to get out of the last deal.
You should not be surprised to learn that all this led to a loss of confidence in the parish leadership by many members of the congregation with all the negative consequences you’d expect in attendance, donations, and enthusiasm in general.
Fortunately, the story has a happy ending: The congregation realized no one was going to solve this problem for them, united within itself, and ultimately persuaded the minister to leave voluntarily, with some incentives encouraging him to do so. And the church still owns the still-vacant lot.
Lessons
There’s a rich tradition in literature of narrators’ letting stories (parables, fables, myths) “speak for themselves,” relying on the audience to draw their own conclusions, and you are amply capable of doing so.
But I want to highlight a few commonalities between these two examples from utterly different walks of life; because as different as the contexts might be, both are stories of leaders at the helm of organizations with proud traditions but which found themselves navigating unexpected turbulent waters as the world around them changed in ways it never had before.
What mistakes did these two leaders have in common? What “failure modes” do these two stories exemplify?
- A “my way or the highway” approach.
No single individual has all the answers, or even most of them. Entertaining different views invariably (in my experience) enhances the power and effectiveness, not to mention the consensus behind, an ultimate decision. “Brooking dissent,” a pejorative phrase, actually helps you lead. - Hubris.
Closely related to our first issue here, but broader and more encompassing. Hubris embraces every unattractive characteristic from supercilious haughtiness to overbearing presumption about one’s own invincible judgment. Zander thought Motorola could learn from Apple; the opposite happened. Our minister thought he could outfox real estate deal-makers; the deal-makers won. - Disengagement from your real job and a focus on image.
Zander seemed to think (we don’t actually know his motivation) he was “above” getting involved with the all-important China market. Maybe it was a more powerful ego-gratification to be the “showman” on the corporate stage. The minister spent great emotional energy on the vacant lot, almost inevitably at the expense of day to day parish leadership and what’s quaintly referred to as “pastoral” duties. In both cases, when the organizations lost confidence in the leader, who should really have been surprised? The moral: Do your job and leave your legacy to the historians. - You’re smarter than the market.
Guess again. For Motorola (before Zander): Analog or digital? Who cares?! We’re comfortable going our own Balkanized ways internally. And under Zander: China? I don’t know, it’s a long way away. For the church: Well, it’s fairly obvious. I can outsmart the real estate professionals.
None of this new; much of it is in fact ancient. But it never hurts to re-learn and reincorporate enduring truths into your behavior and, if I may say so, your very being as a leader. St. Augustine defined the sin of pride as “love of one’s own excellence.” Whether in the 4th Century or today, beware.
