Only one man can save Motorola

In November 2005 he had a heart attack. With him he took the glory and success of being a top brand.

You are taught in business school that no big company is reliant on one person, not even the CEO. Frost was the head of marketing, but so, so much more.

There would be no more innovative, different marketing campaigns like "Hello Moto", there would be no more Razors or Razrs. The spirit left the company with him.

What was a new direction turned into a lucky blip, back to the falling fortunes which predated him where market share had fallen from 35 per cent to 12 per cent.

He'd been a great double-act with Ron Garriques, the head of the Mobile Devices Business, and there was more than respect between them, there was camaraderie and affection. With Frost gone Garriques tried to build the next hit with the system. He sought out the next home run, but never understood what made Razr was that it was built from the heart not the head.

Then Garriques left for Dell and the Motorola machine ran back to the security blanket of processes. Constant "safe pairs of hands" were used to replace him. Casey Keller was brought from Nabisco to do a job which only existed because Geoffrey Frost could do it, and of course the Pringlesman could not.

So that is the problem. Motorola is its own worst enemy and had been saved from itself by Frost. The succession of replacements for Garriques have just made things worse and the mess under the hood is very much more intense than what you can see from the outside.

So who could save Motorola from itself again? What the company needs, indeed what Greg Brown, the current President of both Motorola and Motorola Mobile Devices, has said it needs is new blood. It needs something like Steve Jobs but of course Jobs is busy giving Motorola a bloody nose with the iPhone and building razor-thin notebooks.

Besides if Jobs has made a mistake with the iPhone it’s not understanding the cellular carriers.

It needs to be a charismatic leader, someone the press and Wall Street like. Someone with a track record. Someone who knows the international cellphone business.

The field narrows and narrows until you get to one man. Not an American but a Canadian: Hans Snook. The man who built Orange.

It is very hard to have a real perspective on what he did when it's become history and establishment. Back then in 1994 when telcos were often born out of governments post office departments with a history back to coaches and horses, they had names with the words like ‘telegraph’ in them and logos with post horns. The name Orange was incredibly oddball. Hans Snook launched with SMS, bundled minutes and billing by the second. All things we take for granted today, but Snook understood the importance of innovation and customer service in exactly the way Motorola does not.

He's also hugely international. One of Motorola's many, many problems is that it lives in an American bubble. The staff might be international but they are all very American. Snook is an English name, Hans is not. He might be Canadian but he's run businesses in Hong Kong and Thailand. He was on the board of Carphone Warehouse and a ringtone company. He knows the mobile business inside out.

Speak to people who've worked for him and they are scared of him. The network engineers at Orange kept track of his diary to make sure Orange coverage was going to be good wherever he travelled, but they all say they'd work for him again. They say it without a moment's hesitation. That is the mark of a great leader.

Motorola could be saved from itself. It has good cash reserves, some great engineering and profitable divisions, but to do it would take a very special person and it really does look as though only one man as the resume to do it.®

Catherine Keynes is a electronic engineer turned consultant who works for IT and telecoms companies. She blogs at Cat Keynes