Column Whose fault is it Motorola is in the mess it is in now? In some ways it is impossible to point a finger, but if you want a name it's Geoffrey Frost.

Frost was the marketing man who moved from Nike to Motorola. With him he took the glory and success of being a top brand. At Motorola he built the Hello Moto campaign. He was singularly responsible for a marketing approach to design. While Nokia phones all look like simple rectangles, and Samsung phones look like toilet seats, Motorola phones in 2001 looked like a bit of everything. There was no design language. You couldn’t go into a shop and recognise a Motorola phone.

It was with Frost the insistence of common design was born. It led to the two styles of phone – the Razor and the Pebble. The Razor was never supposed to be any more than a "halo product". Just as Ford lost money on building the Ford GT, the Razor was expected to sell fewer than a million phones. Its job was to reflect glory on the rest of Motorola.

It might even have been OK if just a few hundred were made to be gifts for important customers and to be handed out in the Oscar award goodie bags. Motorola has tight rules on what is allowed in a phone design. It needs to be fairly risk free in terms of engineering, it needs to have established demand, and parts need to be plentiful. Razor broke these rules and many more. It didn't even have a conventional codename – Motorola uses place names – Razor was the name all through development, but it stuck.

The rules were broken because Geoffrey was Geoffrey and he was allowed his indulgence of one, unimportant, phone as a marketing tool. He argued it didn't have to make a profit all it had to do was break even, like the V70 before it and it was free publicity.

Geoffrey put Motorola on the road to success. Over 100m Razrs have been sold. It lost the 'o' not through clever marketing but through a threat of litigation. If you find early announcement material it will have the O in there. The four letter thing then stuck and went on to Pebl and other products.

Geoffrey proved that by working against the system and the rules you could build a hit. He was the friend of the maverick engineer. Not a role you usually find in a marketeer. He did many of the big deals, he identified music as being key to success well ahead of the market. He was popular with the big networks who bought tens of millions of phones.

So why is Motorola's failure his fault?

It’s because he died.

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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 (http://www.catkeynes.com/index.htm)