CNP: What did he say?

ZANDER: Keep in mind, at that time I had a great balance sheet. When I got to Motorola in 2004, we had so much debt that we had a hard time making our payments. So we worked real hard to get a really strong balance sheet. Icahn's team felt that money should be redistributed to the shareholders in order to get the stock up again. We didn't think so. And we had a lot of pleasant meetings.

CNP: Pleasant?

ZANDER: I still talk to him and respect what he has to say. It was never personal. Carl is a very smart investor, but I'm not sure he has experience running companies.

CNP: What finally made him stop trying to have you fired?

ZANDER: You'll have to ask him. I don't think Carl was ever talking about management replacement as such.

CNP: When I first met you at Sun, Eric Schmidt was chief technology officer there. He's now running Google. Who got the better deal?

ZANDER: Well, we know the answer to that question.

CNP: As a kid, you used to have this nickname, Fast Eddie.

ZANDER: That is not true, but once it's on the internet you can't get rid of it. [Sun chairman] Scott McNealy once said I talked fast, being from New York. But growing up, I was always Ed. Only my mother called me Eddie.

CNP: What were your circumstances growing up?

ZANDER: I had a very middle-class upbringing in Brooklyn. My father and mother were both immigrants—he was from Poland and she was from Greece. We moved to Long Island when I was 13. In those days—the '60s—people like John Kennedy were saying, "Let's go to the moon," and that got this country energized about technology, research, a mission. I'm pleading with our government to do the same today. I wanted to be an aeronautical engineer. I wanted to help put a man on the moon.

CNP: But you never did aeronautical engineering.

ZANDER: No. I wasn't very good at it, so I backed off to electrical engineering. I was working at Raytheon, in Boston, in 1968. But I wasn't a good engineer. The things I designed didn't work very well.

CNP: That's a problem.

ZANDER: True. I figured the best thing to do was get an M.B.A. at Boston University. Then I went into marketing.

CNP: You once said you would be willing to take a crappy job if you'd be working for somebody you could really learn from. Like at Buddy Burgers?