Kevin Maney writes every Tuesday in USA Today.
on technology. Last week he talked about how the heck Motorola got so COOL.
My favorite part of the story was the new CEO, Ed Zander (former President at Sun Microsystems) saying that somebody had to tell Motorola employees it was okay to TAKE CHANCES again. Initially, this came from Zander, but Maney said it was best articulated by Chief Marketing Officer, Geoffrey Frost (who joined Motorola from Nike).
Zander says that Geoffrey Frost came in and said, LET’S BUILD WOW PRODUCTS. That then became the internal mantra that goaded the engineers to come up with things like their new RAZR phone.
Maney says Frost had ratcheted
up this inventive fervor by saying that WOW products weren’t enough and that Motorola had to take it to WHOA products.
WOW(!) PRODUCTS (SERVICES)… WHOA(!) PRODUCTS (SERVICES).
What are you building in your FOR IMPACT organization that causes a WOW
or a WHOA?!!!
P.S. Geoffrey Frost died of a heart attack last November at age 56. I’m 56.
Hope that someone will remember me with WOW ideas or WHOA ideas.
