About Christopher Galvin

"What Do You Know and How Do You Know It?"
Christopher Galvin, Chairman and CEO Motorola

Chris Galvin benefited from not only a legacy of learning about business and Motorola from his father, Bob Galvin, but also a respect and appreciation for the need for timely, decisive competitive intelligence. Chris Galvin has met all of the three criteria established for an intelligence-savvy CEO in exemplary fashion. He openly and vocally supports the effort. He has encouraged and provided funding for widespread hiring of professional business intelligence analysts throughout Motorola's business units. He involves the intelligence team in all major corporate decisions, and he is constantly improving on the professional standards to which Motorola must adhere to grow and manage the function within the company. These standards include training, formulating and reinforcing ethical and legal guidelines, and increasing the sophistication of communications technology to speed the flow of critical intelligence to management.

Indications of Chris Galvin's support of and direct involvement in Motorola's competitive intelligence process are many. We gleaned the following from interviews conducted with Chris Galvin himself, his managers, and others outside the company:

- Motorola's intelligence group is charged with helping management anticipate both competitive threats and market opportunities. The intelligence team is also encouraged by Mr. Galvin to challenge his thinking.

- Whenever Chris Galvin is confronted with a strategic problem or a new competitive issue, the central question he always asks (and encourages others on his team to ask) is, "What does our intelligence team know about the issue?" Motorola's recent complex reorganization was completed with an analysis provided to management by the intelligence team.

- The intelligence organization played a key role in forming a number of key alliances and joint ventures for Motorola. In at least one recent instance, based on the intelligence organization's assessment, Motorola's management used the advice it received from the intelligence group to take a large stake in a supplier company in order to strategically thwart any interested rival's ability to buy this firm.

- Mr. Galvin's weekly market briefing to more than 100,000 individuals throughout the company includes input from the intelligence team.

- The intelligence groups within Motorola's business units have grown rapidly in the past three years. The corporate intelligence group manages the relationship among the various business unit teams. Essentially, the growth of business intelligence within Motorola is the result of a grass-roots effort formed into pockets of excellence, with open encouragement from the top.

- Mr. Galvin, a computer-literate CEO, constantly taps into his e-mail. His managers all attest to his quick feedback on any piece of critical intelligence.

… "Are we all seeing the same mental videotape?" is a frequently heard expression from Mr. Galvin during reviews that he has with business unit leaders during their planning sessions. He has set in place a rigorous process to review all information presented during business planning meetings, with a strong intelligence element built into each session.

- He has encouraged the "minority report" approach to allow anyone with alternate or minority opinions to express those opinions. While he looks for consensus, he uses the minority report approach to encourage new, fresh intelligence into management decision making. Even as the program is still unfolding, Mr. Galvin encourages contrarian intelligence views, which have contributed to and changed Motorola's position in the past.

- Mr. Galvin has also made sure that his firm's sales force has tied itself into the corporate intelligence network. He cited as evidence one instance where detailed analysis of a rival's bid allowed Motorola enough time to restructure the bid and win its order. In another instance, the intelligence group learned of a customer's dissatisfaction ­of which the sales force was unaware. The intelligence group presented its findings to the sales organization in time to turn around the account.

- He has ensured that Motorola maintains and educates its organization with a clear set of legal and ethical business intelligence guidelines. The guidelines include the rules surrounding both the gathering and the protecting of critical information. The intelligence group conducts training of both the intelligence professionals as well as managers who are in sales, product development, and numerous other, non-intelligence jobs. Because Motorola is very much involved in the international marketplace, Mr. Galvin has driven the company to review its cultural as well as ethical and legal information-gathering guidelines.

- Motorola is developing a career path for those who want to pursue intelligence as a profession. Mr. Galvin observed that, in the past, those who started out in a competitive intelligence role often transferred out to another, non-intelligence position within Motorola after only a few years. As a result, Motorola had constantly lost the benefit of the experience each individual had gained during those years. With the encouragement and guidance of its intelligence team, Motorola is creating an industry-leading career path in the field of competitive intelligence. The company has seen the numbers of employees involved in intelligence increase dramatically.

Interview with Christopher B. Galvin

"I see business intelligence giving us the ability to be forewarned and to challenge our thinking about our market, our competition, and upcoming events."

Question: Your director of Business Intelligence (BI), among others who know you, state that you openly endorse the use of intelligence at Motorola. Can you give me examples? Do you speak publicly about the process and encourage those in Motorola to promote the use of intelligence? In what other ways do you feel you promote the effort? What do you do to encourage other Motorola managers to use BI?

Answer: My philosophy for intelligence: There are a variety of utilities and benefits to the intelligence activity that my father learned from an intelligence advisory board. The first among these lessons is the general statement: "With the exception of the surprise that comes through invention and innovation, we don't like to be surprised." One of the many contributions that Warren Holtsberg and his business intelligence team make is to keep the feelers out there to give us the forewarning. This forewarning is particularly important in the research and development area. We want to know what is changing, who might be trying to gain an advantage. I see business intelligence giving us the ability to be forewarned and to challenge our thinking about our market, our competition, and upcoming events.

The second aspect ­ or benefit ­ of intelligence is the studious, objective, and analytical input that comes from this effort. Some of the underlying reasons that we have changed our corporate strategy to meet customers' total enterprise solutions are because of the analysis that Warren and his team have delivered. They have allowed us to observe how our competitors and others in our industries look at their customers. This group has alerted us to any new business models used by our rivals. In short, the intelligence group has led us to that conclusion, the conclusion to move toward the business model that offers total solutions for our customers.

A third reason I promote, and have witnessed the benefits of an internal BI program, has to do with objectivity. Analysts on the outside, outside of Motorola, can discuss pricing, but our internal analysts can develop pricing and cost structures from our perspective, assessing it from our vantage point, objectively and in great depth.

Fourth, one can get a fair amount of advice from outsiders, such as investment bankers and others who have interest in selling, or who have their own interests, not always aligned with ours. Our business intelligence group of analysts is entrusted to do an analysis that has no stakes involved ... we rely on the team for these decision-making elements.

Question: How would you describe your personal interest in business intelligence at Motorola, and how it should be used throughout the organization?

Answer: I am very much involved and highly interested in how intelligence can help our business. As it turns out, our business intelligence group gets numerous requests from me for prospective assignments and for analysis. Second, when someone sends me an e-mail or lets me know through a meeting that he or she thinks something is going on ... about the third question out of my mouth is, "What does our intelligence team know about it, or can they find out about it?" This, again, is the fresh perspective we receive [through a rigorous intelligence process].

It [the use of business intelligence] constantly gets reinforced.

Warren Holtsberg is the person who I would contact because he is on corporate staff. Throughout the corporation there are intelligence people, including in Europe, Hong Kong, Latin America, Silicon Valley. We have a web of market analysts who are modeled after the corporate intelligence team. Senior managers typically go to the [intelligence] managers in their team who are in their locale. Warren is the organizer of the entire process.

Question: What business successes can you attribute to competitive intelligence during your tenure as CEO, or as someone who was in charge of a business unit within Motorola?

Answer: As we went through the strategic change and structural change in the company ... a year ago, around solutions, we ended up using the work that was done a year or two prior to that to change our approach to selling and bundling our products and services. Our intelligence effort addressed a number of critical questions that were instrumental in moving us toward a solutions approach. They were: What are the structural changes? What standards are critical to the industry at this time and in the near future? How are customers being served in an enormously complicated telecom market? How do other companies structure their solutions process?

The reorganization of the [entire Motorola communications] enterprise was partly aided by the intelligence effort, as is our selecting new partners, such as Cisco. On a regular basis, we incorporate the business intelligence assessments relating to how industry standards might be established or changed, how we can anticipate which standards will emerge, and the strategic moves we need to make in order to maintain competitive advantage.

Tactically, we have many examples of market successes. For instance, we learned that a number of rivals were interested in buying a company whose technology we had a great deal of interest in. Knowing this, we decided to buy a large stake in the company, thereby thwarting any rival's ability to buy this firm and the technology we felt was critical to our success in this product category.

In another case, we learned that our sales organization was unaware of the depth of dissatisfaction inside a particular customer. Our business intelligence group learned of the problem, examined it in greater depth, and presented the findings before the customer started seeking an alternate supplier, helping sales repair damage in time to turn around the account.

Question: Intelligence standards are an important part of any intelligence organization. Standards include areas such as training and education, legal and ethical guidelines, and access to leading-edge tools and technology. Can you give me ways that Motorola has established these types of standards?

Answer: Generally, in virtually every talk or speech, our management talks of making significant changes ... there are no dogmas that cannot be changed. We maintain a strict set of ethical and legal guidelines that start with broad rules and guidelines for overall business activity. Included among these rules are rules of how you treat and gather intelligence ... there are also rules for protecting sources and for only using honorable, [legally available] sources.

One would not want to subject a corporation ­ any corporation, not only Motorola ­ to one set of standards and the intelligence group to another. These standards apply across the board.

Our intelligence group does conduct training sessions. The corporation, as well, has an ethics and compliance process in every country.

There's a proper way to gather information, including the use of search engines, the use of technology; there's only one way to do it ­ that is the public and honest way ....

The training extends far beyond information-gathering techniques ... it extends beyond the people that have intelligence as a primary function ... they [those in the organization who receive the ethics and compliance training] might have as their primary function sales, technology ....

The intelligence group serves as quality control vehicle ... such that the process is not only honest, but also productive and positive. For instance, there are occasions that we cannot use the information we have come across because it violates the standards.

The last couple of years, more than 300 people have been taking training courses in intelligence practice, specifically.

We have begun to put into place a career management process for intelligence [a career path for this profession within Motorola].

The ethics are reinforced in a very definitive compliance process throughout the corporation. We have a process of "Ethics Renewal," especially in overseas operations .... We have spent entire weekends taking the entire management team to do this with ethics, morals, and culture.

We adapt to that culture. We have an open environment, where we invite discussion. Such a process has practical repercussions for a company such as Motorola. For instance, in the past there were times when we walked away from orders, where we didn't have to [because we were too conservative, overlaying our Western sense of cultural acceptance on another culture, and refused to give that bottle of liquor, for example, thereby losing the account].

We have an ethics committee that will address ethical and legal issues in each country. For instance, in the U.S., an expensive bottle of wine given to a buyer would be considered undue influence. If we refused to give a similar gift in Japan, we might be considered culturally insensitive ­ thereby losing the customer. What is proper in the U.S. may not be outside the U.S. and vice versa. Our Ethics Renewal process, therefore, covers a broader spectrum of issues and is very much individualized for the regions and the countries in which Motorola does business.

Question: Would you say you have built on the intelligence process that your father set in place over a decade ago at Motorola? How has your approach differed with regard to staffing or reporting of intelligence?

Answer: The most significant difference is that the intelligence activity is global and not just limited to the U.S., centered in Schaumburg. Today we have staff everywhere, not just locally. Formerly, it was just U.S., and everyone had to come back to headquarters.

Today, approximately 40% of our business is in the U.S. and nearly 60% is outside the U.S.; the business is global and our global competitors are very effective. It turns out other Scandinavians are the chief rivals. How do you piece together their organization structures that could be very different from ours [or from those of our Asia Pacific rivals]? Japan had opened our eyes, in that regard.

The regulatory rules and trade rules and capital flow is significantly different [than those of 10 or 15 years ago]. The companies we were looking at internationally years ago were country-specific.

Question: What areas of CI would you like to improve throughout the corporation in the next five years?

Answer: I think we have a pretty solid program today. But as we now pursue our solution strategy, we will now require an enormous number of market pieces to come together.

Three or four key issues we need to stay on top of, from an intelligence perspective, are: … Comparing how we are organized will be helpful … Is the substance of this constellation of partnerships we have formed working and are others doing it better? … Anticipating and deciding on make-or-break strategies or breakaway strategies … Is the business intelligence model for anticipating these make-or-break strategies working?

There are other issues we need to address with regard to building our intelligence organization within Motorola, including: … How we include intelligence whenever we talk about strategy at Motorola … Getting an increasing number of people trained in intelligence … Hiring and incorporating those from outside Motorola into our culture … Since we are a more global company than ever before, we need to orient our intelligence to focus on current and future partnerships and customer solutions

The last issue, in my opinion, that we need to tackle has to do with response. We must get people to respond to the input quickly. We have benchmarked companies that have changed their organization every 15 days. We need to be that responsive!

Official Biography

Christopher B. Galvin
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer
Motorola

Christopher B. Galvin began working at Motorola in summer jobs in 1967 and joined the company full time in 1973. For the next decade, he held sales, sales management, marketing management, and product management assignments in the Communications Sector, the two-way radio business in that era.

In 1983, he joined Tegal Corp., a wholly owned subsidiary of Motorola and manufacturer of plasma etching and stripping equipment for the semiconductor industry, as vice president, marketing, sales and service. A year later he was named vice president and general manager of Tegal's U.S. operations.

He became vice president and director of the Communications Sector's Paging Division in Boynton Beach, Fla. in 1985, general manager of the division in 1986, and a corporate vice president in 1987. He moved to senior vice president and chief corporate staff officer in January 1988, and became a member of the Policy and Operating Committees of the corporation. In May 1988, he was elected to the Board of Directors of Motorola, Inc. and elevated to an executive vice president in May 1989.

In January 1990, he joined the office of the CEO as senior executive vice president and assistant chief operating officer. He was elected president and chief operating officer in December 1993, and chief executive officer in January 1997. He assumed the office of chairman of the board of directors in June 1999.

Galvin received a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill., and a master's degree with distinction from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern. He is a director of the Rand Corporation and the Illinois Coalition for science and technology, a trustee of Northwestern University and the American Enterprise Institute, and a member of the Advisory Board of the American Society for Engineering Education. He is also a member of the National Advisory Board for the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

A Legacy of Business Intelligence at Motorola

Bob Galvin is widely recognized as the first chief executive officer (CEO) to realize that multinational corporations ­ like their government counterparts ­ need their own intelligence program if they are to operate and compete successfully around the world. His experience with both competitors and partners during the late 1970s and early 1980s convinced him of this new business imperative. Furthermore, one rather unique experience led him to conclude that such business intelligence endeavors should be run by a small cadre of professionals ­ this was not something to be left to amateurs or part-timers. Mr. Galvin had served on the U.S. President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) and had been given a unique look at how intelligence is both produced and used by government officials to make difficult decisions. In fact, Mr. Galvin actually led one of the major intelligence estimates on the Soviet security threat; this, in turn, instilled in him the respect for professionalism in both intelligence collection and analysis. These experiences, combined with his company's future competitive challenges, caused Mr. Galvin to act on his conviction that business intelligence is both a legitimate and necessary activity for multinational companies.

Motorola formally established its BI program in 1982. And, after an extensive search for an intelligence professional to develop and run the program, they chose a seasoned intelligence officer and manager from the Central Intelligence Agency. Bob Galvin worked closely with his new director of intelligence to create the professional cadre he so strongly believed in. Together they developed the analytical capability needed to assess both the current and future competitive situations Motorola would have to face. A professional intelligence collection network was established to monitor the total competitive environment that Motorola's businesses operated in worldwide. The intelligence Early Warning function, leveraging the human-source collection network, soon became operational to prevent the company from being surprised by its international competitors. And, underpinning all of this was the development and implementation of a formal set of legal and ethical guidelines for the business intelligence operation, with a corporate lawyer assigned to provide advice and counsel on an ongoing basis. In three years, Motorola's business intelligence program became fully operational, supporting both corporate management and business divisions. Mr. Galvin and his senior management team used the resulting intelligence in a wide variety of business activities, from formulating new strategies to making difficult business decisions, such as the decision to fully enter the China market. In addition, the intelligence program was instrumental in successfully negotiating a number of major alliances and several key acquisitions. Equally important, with Bob's encouragement, the business divisions began to set up and operate their own business intelligence units. He strongly believed that the company's business managers ­ not just the executive team ­ should use the intelligence produced by the intelligence organization. This wider use of BI throughout Motorola would take another five to ten years to achieve and required the continued support and leadership of the company's senior management.

Bob Galvin's intelligence legacy at Motorola is strong and alive. It has also found its way into the business world at large. Companies around the world today recognize the need for business intelligence and many have adopted the Motorola model and its professional way of launching and managing intelligence systems. For his global leadership, the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals awarded Bob its Meritorious Award in 1997.

For further information about the Award, contact:

Sarah Gerrol, (617) 523-4141
sarah@morrisseyco.com
Morrisey & Co.
121 Mount Vernon Street
Boston, MA 02108