Solutions CEO recounts ‘bloodiest’ part of Moto split

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Gregory Q. Brown, Motorola Solutions

Motorola Solutions CEO Greg Brown said he insisted his portion of Motorola Inc. — the walkie-talkie and bar-code scanning businesses — keep the Motorola name when the company split.

Brown told the Executives’ Club of Chicago at a Wednesday breakfast program that his fight with Motorola Mobility — the cellphone, smartphone and TV set-top box division of Motorola — over the well-known brand name turned into “the bloodiest fight” of the company’s split into two publicly traded companies earlier this year.

“I said, ‘No way in hell,’ ” when asked to relinquish the Motorola name, Brown said, noting that Motorola invented the police radio and the bar-code scanner.

He realized when he first became CEO of Motorola Inc. in 2008 that the then-hot-selling Motorola RAZR cellphone masked problems in the money-losing wireless telephony business ranging from a surplus of platforms to untenable economies of scale, he said.

He lost 30 pounds in his first 30 days at the top, struggling with issues ranging from activist investor Carl Icahn’s demands, to filing a lawsuit against BlackBerry maker Research in Motion, to the need to spin off the smartphone business, he said.

“It was a lonely time,” he said.

Brown recruited Sanjay Jha from Qualcomm to take over the troubled wireless business, turn it around and spin it off. Jha came aboard as Motorola’s co-CEO. As CEO of Motorola Mobility, Jha announced in August the company’s sale to Google for $12.5 billion.

Brown took the audience by surprise when he said that while walking around his house at 3:30 one morning, bemoaning his struggles with the company, his wife, Anna, told him to pull back his shoulders, get tough and be the leader that the company’s 65,000 employees expected him to be.

Brown advised up-and-coming entrepreneurs and business leaders to “grow a thick skin.”

Brown updated the company’s search for office space, saying it is closing in on a lease for one of what may be three downtown offices where 400 of its workers will be by year’s end. The office site in negotiations is near train lines and will house 100 Motorola Solutions employees.

Brown declined to specify the location, but said he likes it so much he would spend time there rather than at the company’s existing Loop space at 233 N. Michigan Ave.