For over 70 years Motorola has been recognized as a world-class leader in a wide range of communications and electronics markets. Its reputation in quality, innovation and customer service has resulted in numerous awards including being one of the first companies to receive both the Malcolm Baldridge Award for Quality, as well as being named the Top Training Company by the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD).
Since the early 1980s, companies from all over the world have made pilgrimages to Motorola's headquarters in Schaumburg, Illinois to explore and examine its high-performance work practices. What they have discovered is that Motorola's success is built on a foundation of corporate-wide learning that is leveraged to create new products and services, satisfy new and old customers, quickly respond and adapt to the rapidly changing global environment, and develop high-impact teams. The cornerstone for this corporate learning is Motorola University, an institution that has served as the propelling impetus for Motorola becoming one of the top global companies as we enter the twenty-first century.
Founded as the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation by Paul Galvin in 1928 with six employees and less than US$600, Motorola now has global sales approaching US$40 billion with over 130,000 employees worldwide. The company provides integrated communications solutions and embedded electronic solutions. Products are classified into three major categories:
Cellular products make up nearly 40 per cent of Motorola's sales, and the company is the world's third largest maker of semiconductors (about 25 per cent of sales).
Motorola has operations in over 40 countries, and more than 50 per cent of its sales come from outside the United States. It provides wireless telecom services in developing nations and owns 18 per cent of the struggling Iridium communications satellite network. Motorola is presently expanding its software operations in an effort to add Internet access capabilities to its phones and other electronic devices.
Early historical commitment to constant change and quality
Historically, Motorola has continuously endeavoured to improve its products and services before the customer. As Paul Galvin often stated, "Success is a process, not a destination, and it is built on quality." Before it became a US$40 billion high-tech, global powerhouse, Motorola was a small shop peddling battery eliminators-electrical cords enabling battery-powered radios to plug into wall outlets.
Motorola's early successes illustrate the importance of a commitment to constantly reinvent and improve products, company structure, procedures, and people regardless of present success. Unable to compete in a shrinking, increasingly competitive battery eliminator market, Galvin looked to car radios as a new revenue stream. Overcoming the reception problems that had kept other companies out of the market, Galvin Manufacturing successfully introduced the Motorola car radio in 1930, priced 50 per cent lower than its custom-made competition. By 1937, it had expanded into police and home radios.
By aggressively recasting his company as a leading radio manufacturer, Galvin not only ensured its continued health, but he also set the stage for producing two of its best-know wireless products, the Handie-Talkie and the WalkieTalkie, two-way, hand-held radios used extensively during the Second World War.
Shortly after changing its name to Motorola in the late 1940s, Galvin's company reinvented itself again, even though ostensibly Motorola had every reason to be content with its current status. Its home radios continued to sell well. It was supplying 50 per cent of the radios for Ford and Chrysler and all the radios for American Motors, and its introductory television set was the fourth-largest seller domestically after only a few months on the market. Nonetheless, sensing opportunity, Motorola jumped into the virgin field of diodes and transistors. This move enabled the company not only to enhance the technology in its own products but also to supply other manufacturers with parts. It allowed Motorola to enter, excel and expand into new fields when the company could have coasted on its present markets.
Continued commitment to quality and continuous innovation
Motorola endeavours to continuously develop new products and services. Its successes over the years in a wide range of communications and electronics markets cannot be ascribed purely, or even primarily, to a goal of beating the competition, even though that has very often been the outcome. The most important motivation is the more technical objective of always trying to do better. Mobilizing the entire company around apparently impossible goals has long been a central part of the company's corporate strategy.
Since quality is central at Motorola, everything from the antenna on a two-way radio to accelerometer sensors on automobiles is touched with this commitment to attaining perfection. Targets such as the famous "Six Sigma" quality goal of reducing the error rate in every one of the company's processes to fewer than 3.4 mistakes per million operations have helped create a common vocabulary and sense of purpose for Motorola. Even more important, encouraging people to think of ways of continuously improving has kept the organization moving and searching for new opportunities.
This commitment to quality has resulted in numerous quality awards over the years. Motorola was recently named as leading supplier in the worldwide embedded systems industry by Electronic Engineering Times for its launch of the Digital DNA brand around the world. This award was won as a result of being best in class for each of 16 supplier attributes including documentation, pricing competitiveness, application support, customer orientation and technology leadership, a truly phenomenal achievement.
Creating a learning and training culture at Motorola
Motorola is since many years committed to state-of-the-art training. The tradition of training began in the 1920s and has continued to grow in importance ever since. Until the early 1980s, Motorola Corporation had its own array of traditional employee development activities, in which training was a key component. The firm's decision in 1980 to build its own University outside the human resource department of the corporation was a radical one. The University would not displace the role of training within the company; rather, training would continue as a department within the human resource area.
By the end of the 1980s, the University had expanded its operations both in the United States and around the world. Motorola University also began offering new and more comprehensive services, such as on-line learning systems, translation and cultural training and an expanded portfolio of executive education programmes. Nearly all of Motorola's training organizations are integrated and serving the businesses. Nowadays, Motorola University has 99 sites in 23 countries on five continents that deliver over 100,000 days per day of training to employees, suppliers, and customers.
At Motorola University, factory workers study all types of business-related topics from the fundamentals of computer-aided design to robotics, from communication skills to customized manufacturing. They learn not only by reading manuals or attending lectures, but by inventing and building their own products as well. The University does not employ many professors. Instead, it relies on a cadre of outside consultants - including engineers, scientists, and former managers - to teach most of its courses. Their role is to guide people into thinking as well as remembering. In a class on reducing manufacturing-cycle time, for example, senior managers break quickly into teams to devise new ways to get a product to market faster.
Thousands of workers have learned skills at Motorola University that help create new businesses as well as improve existing businesses. As a result, hot-selling products pour off Motorola's assembly lines. The company became the first American electronics firm to perform better than the Japanese, even in their home market. Motorola later organized a course that dramatically reduced product-development "cycle time".
Training at Motorola University linked to business success
It was determined at an early stage that Motorola University would operate with its own board of trustees (general managers of the corporation) and would be chartered to address issues of imminent business need. The University's job was not so much to educate people as to be an agent of change, with an emphasis on retraining workers and redefining jobs. Thus, while other companies may also offer training, Motorola stands out in how it binds education to business targets. For instance, it will set a goal to reduce product-development cycle time, then create a course on how to do it. Today, the link between education and business strategy is as tight at Motorola as it is at any firm in the world.
Motorola's training programme is considered a model in corporate circles because of its strong link to the company's business strategy. "Motorola's whole system is driven from the shop floor", explains Antony Carnevale, a labour economist with the Committee for Economic Development in Washington. "The company trains to solve performance problems. It doesn't just put a little red schoolhouse in the workplace."
Experts also point out that Motorola extends its training programmes to every one of its workers around the world. In contrast, most companies provide training only for certain employees, such as general managers or technicians. Motorola is further recognized for the way it monitors its training programmes. In order to move training efforts closer to operations, for example, the company now offers an increasing number of on-the-job apprenticeships.
Motorola calculates that every US$1 it spends on training delivers US$30 in productivity gains within three years. Since 1987 the company has cut costs by US$10 billion - not by the normal expedient of firing workers, but by training them to simplify processes and reduce waste. Motorola executives believe that the company's sizeable training commitment has contributed to strong financial results. In 1999, Motorola will spend over US$300 million to deliver a minimum of 80 hours of training to each of its 132,000 employees. Altogether, the company lays out more than 4 per cent of its payroll for training, far above the 1 per cent average invested by American industry. Over the past five years, Motorola has seen annual sales increase by an average of 18 per cent, while annual earnings growth has soared to 26 per cent. Productivity measured by sales per employee has climbed 139 per cent during the same period.
Motorola University built upon three key principles of learning
Over the years of the existence of Motorola University, three key principles about learning and how it can impact business success have been learned. The first principle recognized was that learning and change need to go hand and hand for all of Motorola, as the company's initial experience with training initiatives yielded little or no change in business operations. Employees were complacent about change, because they did not see why it mattered. The company ultimately had to let them know that an unwillingness to change was considered poor performance. Accountability or what was termed "shared responsibility for change" had to be developed across the entire organization. Mixed messages from managers about quality principles undermined the momentum of change. A firmly held belief at Motorola is that change must begin at the top. Motorola University has helped the organization evolve from a view of change as something done to others for the benefit of a few to a view of change as something done collectively for the benefit of the whole.
A second principle learned is that innovation is much more likely to occur when people participate in the solution rather than having it handed to them. When change affects an entire organization, everyone needs to participate in the details of change within their sphere of influence. Senior management may be accountable for setting a strategic direction for the organization, but management is too far removed from daily operations to dictate the changes needed to achieve the strategic objectives of the firm. In the mid-1980s, for instance, Motorola established an 18-month time frame to design a new product, down from the past precedent of anywhere from three to seven years. The firm developed a two-week course that brought marketing, product development, and manufacturing managers together to meet, argue, and reach agreement about the needs of the market, the right new product, and the schedules and responsibilities of each group producing it. This action learning format overcame the traditional problems that arose when the three departments met and agreed on plans but went on with their work as if nothing had been agreed upon. Action learning was not first of all an effort at improving educational delivery systems, but rather an outgrowth of the strategic agenda of the firm. Motorola wanted to use the training to send a message to the company about achieving quality through the integration of efforts across functions, a message not just about quality of product but about quality of people, quality of service, and quality of the total organization. Thus, organization context dictates learning strategy, which, in turn, evolves models of educational implementation.
The third principle of learning for Motorola was the importance of creating the proper tension between a single-mindedness of purpose within the organization and a broader frame of reference extending beyond the organization. Learning is about inquiry and, even within an organization as large as Motorola, the internal conversation can become fairly one-sided where the questions all begin to sound the same. For example, the intense focus that achieved Six Sigma standards of manufacturing excellence can also lead to tunnel vision.
Moving training from employee development to business redefinition
Throughout most of the 1980s, Motorola University built credibility within the organization by developing educational experiences that addressed a number of imminent business needs. The tie between education and business strategy was seen as a key objective, whether it came to reducing costs in operations, improving product quality, or accelerating new product development.
In today's uncertain and turbulent business environment, Motorola University is focused on raising questions where the answers do not yet exist. The University's role, which parallels the changing competency requirements of individuals within the organization, is to raise the level of inquiry within the company through a diversely structured dialogue with customers, experts, and industry representatives (suppliers, regulators, policy makers, and special interest groups).
Motorola University's initiatives in recent years look more like new business development activities than classic educational programmes. The purpose and outcome of a month-long project may be to understand how to create and manage a software business, or the learning may include dialogues extended to customers, experts from both within and outside an existing network for the company, and industry representatives who are new to the company.
Thus, new business development in an era of discontinuous change is not new business development as it has been understood in the past. And while initially it appears that Motorola University is merely serving as an incubation centre for the more entrepreneurial activities of the company (it is not by accident that the new business development offices for the company are right next door to the University), there is a more deeply rooted focus of change for the University: knowledge creation. In raising questions where the answers do not yet exist for the company, Motorola University is creating the forum within the company to explore beyond the known boundaries of its business and its industry. The objective of the University is to develop the critical competencies of the company to generate for itself new models or maps for making sense of the market when the environment becomes uncertain or ambiguous.
Motorola University is also creating a research agenda that has moved it even closer to the classic university charter, but it is doing so based on the evolution of learning within the corporation. As the company shifts more of its inquiry on its future outside the context of a set of well-defined customers and into ill-defined or even undefined markets, then it must also develop a critical set of new competencies within the organization and among its stakeholders equal to the level of inquiry in which it is engaged.
In 1995, the University hosted its first research colloquium in Malaysia, which looked very much like a conference academic universities have organized for hundreds of years, i.e., a sharing of new knowledge arising from the research of individuals and colleagues. The unique feature of this conference was that the presentations were all delivered by Motorola employees for Motorola employees and invited guests. A similar research conference was held at the Motorola University facility in Arizona in 1997.
Technology for learning and high performance on a global scale
A recent important initiative at Motorola University has been the creation of a new institute to develop educational delivery systems around satellite, Internet, and virtual reality technologies. This College of Learning Technologies (CLT) is a department of Motorola University and involves a cadre of experts in instructional, multimedia design and educational technology. The charter is to provide innovative learning via classrooms, on-line experiences and multimedia components such as video and satellite conferences. The department develops courses, learning tools and methodologies and conducts applied research to make sure it is providing the best services available. Motorola is exploring ways, through the CLT, to develop a new educational products market worldwide for Motorola technology.
By using leading-edge, performance-improvement methodologies, applied research and technology, the CLT provides learning solutions through the use of CD-ROMs, Web-based systems, instructor-led training, on-line communities of practice, and video and satellite conferencing to Motorolans worldwide.
As Motorola University continues to pursue its comprehensive learning strategy, the CLT is at the forefront in providing the learning solutions to reach all Motorolans with "the right knowledge, at the right time, anywhere in the world". A key strategic element is providing tools for instructional designers and subject matter experts to easily create on-line learning for global distribution.
Today, Galvin's son Christopher, who is Motorola's president, and Gary Tooker, the company's chief executive, carry on the commitment to education. Employee training is now so deeply ingrained at Motorola that every employee - from top executives to factory workers - is responsible for identifying courses he or she wants to study each year. If supervisors spot performance deficiencies at annual reviews, they weigh in with their recommendations, and a remedial plan is set up. The CLT makes ongoing individual learning possible for every Motorola employee.
Empowered self-managed work teams
In today's complex marketplace in which customers expect seamless responses to their requests, the utilization of self-managed work teams is absolutely essential. Motorola has committed itself to the development and utilization of such teams and attributes much of its success in quality, customer satisfaction and overall business success to the existence of these teams. Initiatives such as Six Sigma, Designing for Manufacturability, and Cycle-Time Reduction through Cross-Functional Process Mapping, for example, require empowered teams for successful implementation.
As a mechanism for developing and promoting the power of teams in the service of global customers, Motorola initiated a Total Customer Service (TCS) teams competition in 1990. Now more than 4,000 teams participate on an annual basis, representing disciplines such as design engineering, customer support, and even the administrative and executive units at Motorola's Schaumburg headquarters.
Some winners of the recent TCS teams competitions in Orlando included:
These teams at Motorola and elsewhere prove that empowered employees working together, from the lowest position to the highest, can have a significant impact on the worldwide success of a global company.
Agility and speed in responding to crises
The 1990s created tremendous challenges for Motorola. The European telecom giants Nokia and Ericsson were rapidly "leapfrogging" Motorola in telephone technology and design. The Asia financial crisis affected manufacturing and sales for many of Motorola's products. Motorola responded quickly by instituting several renewal programmes built around the following four processes:
Thanks to its tremendous innovative ability and agility created by its corporate learning culture and enhanced by Motorola University, the company has successfully navigated these recent crises, as demonstrated by stock prices reaching an all-time high in late 1999.
Preparing for future crises and chaos
Motorola realizes that it must be prepared for what will be ongoing challenges and crises in the highly competitive and chaotic telecom field of the twenty-first century. Thus, leaders and staff throughout the company are continuously assessed and trained in a large variety of categories such as: overall performance, teamwork and cooperation, vision and strategy, praise and recognition, creativity and risk taking, communication, flexibility, integrity and trustworthiness, objectivity and practical intelligence, loyalty to the company, initiative and commitment, diversity, empowerment, total customer satisfaction, humility and business knowledge. They are challenged to consider the following questions:
Motorola's recipe for continuous performance improvement has been quite simple:
Learning and an emphasis on quality are not the only reasons for Motorola's bottom-line success, but experts contend that the company's emphasis on continuous education and innovative quality are crucial advantages in today's marketplace. "Training", declares Anthony Carnevale, "is the strongest variable we see contributing to higher returns, and its importance grows over time." And there is growing financial proof at the company that continuous learning may be one of the smartest investments employers and employees ever make. By investing heavily in its belief that better-educated employees are better competitors, Motorola is staying on the cutting edge.
[Top]
[Home | Acknowledgements
| Overview | Chapter 1 | Chapter
2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter
5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Appendix
| Bibliography | Sitemap
For more information please contact: InFocus
Programme on Skills, Knowledge and Employability
4 route des Morillons - 1211 Geneva 22
Telephone: +41 22 799-7512
Fax: +41 22 799-63-10
e-mail: ifpskills@ilo.org
