CNP: Speaking of that, when you came in at Motorola, you went around visiting customers and got slammed.

ZANDER: That's a nice word for it. They pounded me for Motorola's poor quality, missed deliveries, whatever. So we made customer satisfaction part of our executive team's bonuses.

CNP: At the Consumer Electronics Show, in January, you showed me a little card stating Motorola's corporate values and mentioned a big internal fight over the wording.

ZANDER: The line we fought over is "We're here to win." In Silicon Valley—I don't care if you're in last place—you think about winning every day. That line was too aggressive for some people at Motorola, but we're now No. 1 in set-top boxes for cable TV. We're No. 1 in government and public-safety radio communications.

CNP: Soon after you arrived at Motorola, the company came up with this game-changing piece of technology, the Razr. Was that a process you can repeat, or was it luck?

ZANDER: I'm always asked, "What's after Razr?" And I say, "The C.E.O. doesn't design phones." There was a small team developing the Razr before I got there. When I saw the technology, it blew me away. But I remember visiting some of our carrier partners and being told, "This is not going to work. We don't want it. There's not a market for these things."

CNP: What's the next Razr?

ZANDER: The Razr was like hitting a grand slam, and you can't hit a grand slam every time. You win baseball games with lots of singles and doubles, good fielding, good pitching. In the global device business, if you want to be successful, you have to be maniacally boring.

CNP: What do you mean?

ZANDER: It's about having lots of products come out on time. It's the supply chain. It's the cost structure.

CNP: You've taken some hits recently for not buying Navteq. It's in your backyard; former Motorola C.E.O. Chris Galvin is the chairman...

ZANDER: I didn't know that about Chris Galvin.

CNP: He didn't call you up and say, "Ed, you should buy this company"?

ZANDER: No. But even if he had, Navteq has nothing to do with us. We're not in the applications business. You've got to pick what side you want to be on. Our goal is to provide the best platform for developers to create applications.