Warrior leaves Motorola with armor intact: CTO’s departure caps months of executive change-outs

The departure of Padmasree Warrior, Motorola Inc.’s CTO, effective yesterday, came on the heels of CEO Ed Zander’s recent announcement that he will leave his CEO post at month’s end-and caps a year in which the executive faces at Motorola have blurred.
The year also saw 7,500 people in the rank-and-file lose their jobs based on the company’s executives’ decisions and its dismal financial performance.
One question lingering in the air: was Zander and Warrior’s timing due to another dismal quarter, almost over, or simply part of a well-planned succession in which executives tied to Zander and the company’s successful Razr era have decided to move on?
Warrior joined Motorola in 1984 and had become one of its most visible executives as well as one of the leading female technologists in the United States. She became CTO in 2003, as the Razr era began.
Warrior had embraced Zander’s oft-repeated vision of “seamless mobility,” a concept that would tie together each of its four main businesses in handsets, networks, connected homes and enterprises. That vision is likely to become more focused on the handset business, which has produced the bulk of Motorola’s revenue and profit. Warrior had also championed Motorola’s work on WiMAX to serve Sprint Nextel Corp.’s next-gen ambitions, the realization of which has come into question of late.
Warrior’s departure comes at the end of a long, difficult year for Motorola, in which its mobile devices chief, Ron Garriques, and the two interim heads who replaced him, Ray Roman and Terry Vega, also departed, in addition to former CFO, David Devonshire. During the year, Motorola also replaced executive leadership in its mobile device businesses in Asia, Western Europe and Latin America, in its semiconductor division and named new executives for corporate and mobile device marketing.
Greg Brown, currently president and COO, will step into the CEO role in January. Stu Reed was named the new mobile devices leader in July. Tom Meredith took the CFO reins this summer as well.