Dear Motorola: Instead Of Suing Competitors, Maybe Figure Out Why Employees Are Leaving
from the blame-everyone-else dept
As a company, if things aren't going well, it's often difficult to accept that some of the blame may be on your end -- which makes it especially easy to lash out at competitors, assigning blame to them. This becomes troublesome when it starts to involve lawsuits. Just a couple months ago, we noted that Motorola was suing a former exec for jumping ship to Apple. And, now the company is suing RIM for getting a bunch of Motorola employees to leave Motorola and join RIM. To any outsider, it seems clear that Motorola has some problems that make it so employees are tempted to jump to other companies. But rather than focus on figuring out how to fix that, and make things such that employees want to stick around (making cooler phones might be a good place to start), it's lashing out at competitors who are more appealing to Motorola's own employees. In the meantime, Motorola might want to check out the research that shows the free flow of employees between competitors helps spread innovation across the entire market. In other words, stop suing people because your employees are leaving, and start figuring out ways to make employees want to work for you.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: employees, mobile phones
Companies: apple, motorola, rim
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Lack of innovation
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Look at the HR . . . follow the money
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Re: Look at the HR . . . follow the money
I left Motorola becuase it did not matter what you did, the new management style is "It is never good enough". In fact I was a highly decorated and awarded Motorolan. Which resulted in many merit raises over time. I was working from 6am to 11pm, a large part of my business was on conference calls to China. When I complained to my boss about working 6.5 days a week 16 hours a day(after taking time out to eat), that 6 hours of sleep a night was not enough. He seriously looked me in the eye and said, " What makes you think you need 6 hours of sleep a night?" Motorola does not respect itself, it's suppliers, or it's employees. That is the problem, Greed and self centeredness as a whole.
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deja vu ?
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Competition? Nooooooooo......
This has probably always been true, but market realities have always overcome the short sighted thinking. Now businesses have marvelous tools like business model patents and DCMA takedown notices that allow them to live in their fantasy world a bit longer than normal before reality bites them.
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I missed something...
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Re: I missed something...
Maybe they have it in there that you can't leave for a competitor.. Or that your soul belongs to Motorola..
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Re: Re: I missed something...
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hahaha
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The Motorola Virus
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Re: The Motorola Virus
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retaining top people
Building an environment like what we had was easy, not being obsessed with market share made our business model work and that very few even today have copied. Oh, we accomplished the market share we wanted without trying.
From twelve to six hundred employees in four years at which we put on the growth breaks for the owner's benefit, for reasons we could not really understand but were obliged to do because he owned the company and didn't want it any larger. Today, the company still exists and runs as smoothly as ever from what I can see (I retired in 1990) it has grown but at a much slower pace and that was due to strict controls at upper managements requests. Many people who were just starting out there when I left are still there...I was from day one for 20 plus years.........I still miss the place.
Do what you have to do to keep employees and management happy, treat them like royalty---treat customers as they should be treated....like royalty....and provide a service or product that goes beyond the your customers expect. Oh, provide services or products that are needed(first rule)!
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contracts
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Re: contracts
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Re: Re: contracts
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Dear Mike: This is why
You seem to think that all should play nice in the pool, even when the evidence shows that all are willing to piss in the water just to keep it for themselves.
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Re: Dear Mike: This is why
Ahhh the classic Hobbes v Locke "state of nature" debate, reduced rather nicely to "peeing in a pool".
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Re: Contract
Even though TX is a right to work state, the non-compete is binding as long as it includes reasonable limits on timeframe, location, and industry. And even if a judge finds that some part of the agreement isn't reasonable, the judge can alter just those portions of the contract. In other words, if the agreement says you can't go to work for another company for 3 years, and the judge says 6 months is reasonable, they can change it.
IANAL, but I've been on both sides of this situation, and have received legal counsel on it.
The bottom line as an employee looking to jump ship: make sure your new employer has agreed to bear all costs should your previous employer decide to sue.
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While I am sure that the freeflow of ideas is a good thing, the particular case you are looking at is a very valid law suit that Motorola will probably win. The person who left was very involved in Motorola's relationships with all the network operators and knew all the ins and outs of getting a phone approved by a operator. Lets just say AT&T in this case. That person is a very highly paid executive who also knows all of the phones coming down the pipe. When they leave to goto a competitor launching a new line of business they take all of their knowledge of both the process and products with them. What the executive did when they went to Apple was sell Mot's trade secrets for the price of his salary, stock options, and probably some ridiculous sign on bonus.
This is not some engineer switching jobs. This is an executive making 200k+ a year who knows what the rules are.
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Re:
That doesn't exactly seem like trade secret info. That sounds like a job skill. Why should he be prevented from earning a living at any other company?
That person is a very highly paid executive who also knows all of the phones coming down the pipe.
Look at the iPhone. Look at Motorola's phones. I don't think Apple is learning anything from Motorola here.
In the meantime, based on your logic, no high level exec could ever leave a company. That seems ridiculous and bad for everyone.
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Re:
This sometimes leads to R&D budgets being slashed. If so, this can create a shock, which some don't know how to handle, so they may leave for better pastures which value and will harness this creative mind.
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reply
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The lawsuit is about a contract between Motorola and RIM, not between Motorola and an employee. When RIM started violating the contract that they signed, what else was Motorola supposed to do?
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Re:
article -> "In the paperwork, Motorola says that RIM is violating a non-solicitation contract the two companies ..."
So, these two companies conspired to create a black list ???
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Motorola - design over usability
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