Zigging and Zagging on Zander

Business Press Maven Marek Fuchs wants to know what happened to the all the media fans of Ed Zander when the Motorola boss finally announced he was stepping down? Fuchs points out that most of the news accounts since Friday's announcement have roughed up the once-lauded Zander for missing 3G and failing to deliver another winner after the meteoric Razr.

But Fuchs plays dirty by presenting us with every reporter's nightmare -- the old clips.

What used to be inconveniently buried deep down in each paper's basement morgue now sits just a few keystrokes away on the web, waiting for accountability-hawks like Fuchs to check out the coverage history. While Zander was not excessively lionized, most of the pre-2007 reports did tend to characterize him favorably as the strong medicine Motorola needed.

The change of coverage is hardly surprising, given the performance pressure Zander has faced since January, including a few love-taps from Carl Icahn. But that coverage shift is completely instructive about how the business press tends to over-simplify characterizations of CEOs.

After all, did Ed Zander change?

Nope, but the context around him did. When Zander took the job, Motorola was struggling. After years of being run primarily by quiet underachievers, including patricianly descendents of the founder, Motorola was generally portrayed as a traditional Midwestern company in need of an energetic outsider who could awaken the sleepy culture.

That dynamic played well to one of the most common (and superficial) assumptions that business reporters and sell-side analysts tend to carry in their heads -- every struggling company needs new blood at the top. It's just so darn easy to write. And not only was Zander a hopped-up, wise-cracking New Yorker who had developed Silicon Valley sensibilities, he also had come from the tech world, not mobile phones.

Flash-forward to now, after the gaudy rise and fall of the Razr, and the context is completely different, with bad numbers, and worse prospects for the future growth.

So what do we now read is the big problem? Well, most of the coverage says that Zander didn't understand what phone-buyers wanted next, and that he never really overcame the company's political infighting.

The immediate lesson is that when results languish, "outsiders" have short windows in which their lack of industry experience will continue to be perceived as a plus.

So what's the media consensus on Zander's successor, quiet insider Greg Brown?

The NYT's Laurie Flynn sticks to orthodoxy.

"But some Wall Street investors (and) analysts had thought Motorola might name a successor for Mr. Zander from outside the company, perhaps seeing an opportunity for a more significant change of direction."

As quartet of WSJ reporters pointed to the same notion (but then also provided significant detail about several promising actions Brown has taken).

"Some analysts are concerned that Mr. Brown's too close to Mr. Zander to make enough of a change. Some investors were likely looking for someone from the outside -- possibly a luminary in the telecom industry -- to take the company in a new direction.

'There's a relief rally in that the CEO succession plan has been made. But I'm still not quite sure if Brown is big enough to take Motorola to the next level,' said Bill Choi, an analyst at Jefferies & Co."

Bloomberg's Ville Heiskanen used sell-side quotage to take the cautious skepticism about Brown even further.

"'I don't see him as a person who is going to come in and razzle-dazzle the troops,'' said Lappin, president of Gramercy Capital Management in New York. She sold her Motorola shares last year and isn't buying them back. 'He's kind of a bland guy.''"

Cautious skepticism is, of course, always the safest ground for any journalist. Particularly those hoping not to be embarrassed by Fuchs in a couple years.

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