Christopher Galvin Quotations

Given the expected strength of global economies over the next year or so, we intend that Motorola shareholders will benefit from our continued focus on crisp execution and improving profitable growth.

We may do slightly better in sales and in profitability than present consensus expectations of the investment community. The longer-term business climate is improving, although we believe it is premature to increase consensus sales and earnings estimates for the full year of 1999 beyond their present levels.

We have been assessing the impact these factors have had on us, as well as on other companies, particularly in the last 30 days. We have begun to take additional actions to streamline our portfolio and reduce the cost of our operations.

Through these propositions, we intend to gain market share in key businesses, such as digital cellular telephones, where significant new products are planned for introduction before the end of the third quarter, and embedded semiconductors.

There have been periods in Motorola's history, including the early 1990s, when the sales growth rates and profitability of certain of our individual businesses were out of phase with each other.

These actions have been designed to adjust our costs to softening global market conditions and, as the market recovers, to restore the trend of improved profitability that we had achieved over the last two years.

Despite the recent erosion of equity values in high-tech or 'new economy' companies, we continue to believe that we will create shareholder value by being the leader in bringing wireless, broadband and the Internet to our target markets of the person, the work team, the home, and the car.

It's far from over, but I think they're working in the right direction. The fundamental issues haven't really been discussed or resolved.

At this stage, it appears that the momentum from our accelerated profit improvement effort will continue in the second quarter.

I took a long view in order to not destroy the core Galvin-defined principles imbued in Motorola, such as constant respect for people, its instincts for breakthrough innovation, and continuous renewal in thinking and process rigor.

The way that Wall Street works is most people like very steady quarterly earnings, and they like to be very popular instead of unpopular and they don't like to be the nail that sticks up, as they say.

What most people don't understand about failure in innovation is that it's an investment. It's actually an investment in experience.

Once people have tried to do something they think is uniquely innovative and it doesn't work, they're actually now more valuable because they know what not to try the next time, or what to try differently.

If you want to be an innovator, you have to take risks. And sometimes things work and sometimes they don't work...

Leading innovation can be a uniquely lonely and unpopular thing because most of the time, you have to stand by yourself saying, "Everybody sees the world this way. I see the world another way."

You have to give credit where credit's due. Steve [Jobs] has been probably the single hardware/software forward-looking thinker and executor in our lifetime as an individual. He's quite a brilliant innovator.

The Galvins like to think about certain things that most people think are impossible, and then we like to engage a process to try to make them possible.

We Galvins define leadership as 'taking people elsewhere.'

When does your next idea come? You don't really know yet, and therefore there's a lot of uncertainty associated with innovation companies. Most often, the true innovators have to stand all by themselves at the beginning and predict that the world will be different.

While we very much regret the impact this will have on certain employees, we must adjust our production capacity to the reality of current business conditions and reduce costs to improve overall financial performance.

This is our eighth consecutive quarter of delivering on our promises to achieve a significant turnaround, improved profitability and a strategic refocusing of Motorola around wireless, broadband and the Internet.