Motorola's Mike Zafirovski A track record of Solid Results

Essay by msbonnielaneUniversity, Bachelor'sA+, October 2004

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Mike Zafirovski, Motorola's President and Chief Operations Officer, and seemingly the companies answer to getting back on top of the market. In April of 2001 Motorola made headlines in that the company showed its first loss in fifteen years of an excruciating $206 million dollars. One year later, late July of 2002, Christopher B. Galvin, the company's CEO, announced a change on their executive team. "Mike Z" formerly of GE, who had been with Motorola for two years, had been appointed President and COO. In an effort to calm and assure stockholders of the company's stability the following announcement was made: "Mike has the best operation turn around credentials of anybody at the company. Nobody has more energy than Mike. He knows how to see the future."

Bringing with him the track record of solid results with 14 years of managerial experience (Barthold), since Mike Z.'s takeover many production changes have been made to get Motorola out of the red and back in the black.

His strong leadership style was much needed and, not surprisingly, well respected among everyone he dealt with. Mike was faced with some "hard right vs. easy wrong" decisions when he made the choice to trim the Motorola workforce by 38% (down to 93,000 employees).

Operating expenses were cut by 14% and the once large line (over 128 styles) of Motorola phones were trimmed down to only offering less than twenty. In order to get the company back on the right track with fresh new ideas and stronger initiatives for the company to succeed, not only did Mike replace over half the top company executives, he also got rid of the lowest performing 10% of the managers.

He motivated the employees by "pushing for employee bonuses based on profitability and cash flow." This...