How Motorola Lost Its Edge

Many organizations have gone down, and some died a natural death due to a lot of reasons. It is not that these organizations did not plan or that they did not take action when they noticed the issue, but most of them did not take the appropriate action (Sull,1999). Some organizations suffered because of their stubborn managers and lazy employees who reacted but refused to act at the right time. Some organizations are very rigid and follow business as usual, even when they are supposed to respond to dramatic environmental shifts; this is what Sull (1999) called active inertia. Nobody planned for COVID-19 but when it came, some organizations folded up while some organizations are still functioning. It all depends on the proactiveness of the organization to both internal and external forces.

Motorola was very successful and was first known through its two-way radios and later it became the world’s first mobile phone manufacturer (Newman, 2010). Motorola built and sold around 120 million units of the best-selling mobile phone, Razr v3, in 2004. 

Motorola must have thought of expanding this business when it partnered with Apple in 2005. Little did Motorola know that Apple has come to shadow their activities to unveil their secrets. They both worked together and produced Rokr E1 (Sapience, 2020). In 2007, Apple finished its mission with Motorola and came out bigger with its iPhone. Apple became Motorola’s competitor and caused Motorola to lose 4.3 billion between 2007 and 2009. Moreover, Motorola’s market share dropped from 21% that it was in 2006 to 2% in 2011; what a great loss!

Sociotechnical is a combination of two words social and technical. Every organization needs to make both social and technical inter-relate for the organization to stand tall in society. For my sociotechnical project, which I detailed its scope in this week’s individual project (IP), Motorola’s failure is a good example for me to consider focusing not only on the technical but also on society to achieve the desired excellence. Motorola was so engulfed in its technical expertise but failed to be vigilant and sensitive to its environment.

The two forces that may affect my innovation ideas are financial and technical. My innovation idea will involve a lot of technical expertise and the technicalities will attract funds, therefore if there are sponsors and enough experts, it is promising to be a success.

References

Newman, R. (2010). 10 Great companies that lost their edge. https://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2010/08/19/10-great-companies-that-lost-their-edge

Sapience, S. (2020). The rise and fall of Motorola.  https://startupsapience.medium.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-motorola-f4a20646b47f

Sull, D. (1999). Why good companies go bad. https://hbr.org/1999/07/why-good-companies-go-bad