Moto's Mojo

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Jim Wicks: Motorola VP, design guru, father of the new Pebl.

Wicks at Motorola's new satellite studio in downtown Chicago.

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Rising by Design

If the Razr is a Ferrari, the Pebl is a Volkswagen bug: cute and curvy--a pet rock that makes calls, plays games, and records blurry video clips. It's black or red, with a smooth, rubbery surface and an understated external display. For a company churning out flashy thin phones, the Pebl is a dramatic departure. "The Pebl is critical for us," says Wicks. "We're saying not every consumer has the Razr mind-set."

Wicks calls the Pebl "almost an homage to subtlety." It opens like no other handset: Slide the top back with your thumb, and the top flips open in what Wicks calls the Pebl's "defining gesture"; he demonstrates, casually opening and closing it in quick succession, as mesmerizing a motion as playing with a Zippo lighter--or a switchblade.

Like the Razr, the Pebl doesn't evoke the old Motorola, where, for decades, engineers ruled the roost (and with great success: the first portable two-way radio, first pager, first rectangular picture TV tube, the list goes on). Design typically got short shrift. With handsets, says Daryl Armstrong, a Citigroup analyst, "the focus wasn't on form factors [shapes]. Motorola executives would boast, 'We created functionality that is so complex the carriers don't know how to use it!' " Hardly the criterion designers are looking to satisfy.

"We were those guys over there who draw," says Paul Pierce, the North American studio's creative director who joined the company five years ago. Even when designers did participate, they were at a disadvantage. "It was the classic situation: one designer in a room full of 40 engineers," says Jim Caruso, design's senior director of operations. Typical of companies that have yet to recognize the strategic value of design, Motorola didn't even include designers in key strategy sessions. It simply told them which products to make.

Wicks was brought in five years ago to help dislodge this way of thinking. With his mussed brown hair, wire-rim glasses, jeans, and wry sense of humor, he comes across initially as a shy hipster geek, not a VP at an international behemoth. But once Wicks opens up, he's as shrewd as any suit.

He got his start in Japan (he moved abroad after majoring in industrial design); there, he was one of Sony's first non-Japanese designers. Over 14 years, Wicks worked on Sony's first cell phone and other electronics. After being promoted to Motorola's head of consumer-experience design in 2003, he set about building a world-class design culture similar to Sony's--focused, strategic, and highly collaborative.

The elevation of design was a group effort. One of the early evangelists was the late Geoffrey Frost, a former Nike whiz who later became Motorola's chief of marketing under Zander. It was Frost who created the four-letter names and high-profile campaigns that help make Moto's phones memorable. Around the same time, Wicks and his team arrived at some core principles--surprise, honesty, richness, and simplicity--to better define what makes a handset unique to Motorola. There are unwritten guidelines as well, such as the "three-meter rule": With so many competing models littering the landscape, Motorola wants its devices to be identifiable by shape, finish, and lighting--from 10 feet away.

Like a Rock

One of the biggest imperatives at the new Motorola is longer-term, more coordinated product development. Moto's portfolio resembles a family tree: Below the Razr are branches to the Slvr and Q, and to future "children of Razr," as Wicks puts it.

"We don't think of a project, we think of projects," he says. He and Ron Garriques, the head of mobile devices and another champion of design, want devices that relate to one another, building on successful technology and design. Shared profiles and components help cut costs, of course ("the lowest cost structure in this industry always wins," says Garriques), but they also create identity. And it is that sort of methodical portfolio-building that distinguishes a design-driven organization.

"Nobody took the StarTac platform and turned it into a candy bar [phone] or an email device. If we had, RIM wouldn't be alive today." --Ron Garriques, Motorola's head of mobile devices

In hindsight, Motorola should have adopted this approach years ago. "Nobody took the StarTac platform and turned it into a candy bar or a QWERTY [email] device," says Garriques. "If we had, RIM [the maker of BlackBerry] wouldn't be alive today."

But a company can only spin off so many generations before it's time for a new idea. And with an increasing number of competitors flooding the marketplace, Motorola turned to Yoon Ho's Pebl sketch with a sense of urgency. Working at MotoCity, a slick new design center in downtown Chicago (created by Wicks and Caruso, his operations counterpart, to attract design talent leery of the suburbs), the team set about turning Yoon Ho's concept into reality. "The challenge was really steep," says mechanical engineer Jason Wojack. "You would come across a problem that seemed unsolvable and it would stay that way for a while. I don't think there was anything that wasn't difficult with this phone."