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How a team of engineers and designers defied Motorola's own rules to create the cellphone
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(FORTUNE Magazine) - Hundreds of Motorolans jammed into a company auditorium in
Schaumburg, Ill., last December to mourn the sudden death of their storyteller-in-chief. Bear Stearns hits 5-year low

It was a bittersweet moment for Motorola (Research). Geoffrey Frost, the 56-year-old marketing
genius responsible for the company's snappy "Hello Moto" ad campaign, had died in his sleep of
a heart attack two weeks earlier. Thanks in no small part to Frost's dramatic flair, the proud but
humbled company was on the upswing for the first time in years.

CEO Ed Zander, who eulogized Frost that day, had

promoted him to executive vice president only hours before
he died. Frost, you see, had become a symbol of Motorola's
resurgence as an unexpectedly stylish technology
powerhouse.

For a few engineers and industrial designers attending the

memorial service, though, Frost represented something more.

The celebration of his life drew attention to their greatest

accomplishment, the creation just two years earlier of the
ultrathin, superhip RAZR V3, the hottest Motorola phone in
nearly a decade. Frost had been the phone's cheerleader; he'd
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come up with its catchy four-letter name. He also had spun
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an appealing narrative about how Motorola was cool again, to be notified on topics you're interested in.
and a myth about the slick downtown Chicago design studio
where the phone had taken shape. Or, visit Popular Alerts for suggestions.
The RAZR team Manage alerts | What is this?
The story behind the RAZR's creation

What the unsung team of heroes knew, however, was that the
actual story of how the RAZR came to be is even more
Name
compelling than, if not quite as glamorous as, the version
Frost had peddled. Address

City
In reality, the RAZR - a play on a code name the geeks
themselves dreamed up - was hatched in colorless cubicles in State/Pr Zip/Postal

exurban Libertyville, an hour's drive north of Chicago. It was E-mail

a skunkworks project whose tight-knit team repeatedly
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flouted Motorola's own rules for developing new products. Engineer Jellicoe (right) made Weiss
(center) the first member of his team. Outside the U.S. and
Arnholt (left) was in charge of the Canada, click here.
They kept the project top-secret, even from their colleagues. distinctive look.

They used materials and techniques Motorola had never tried

before. After contentious internal battles, they threw out
accepted models of what a mobile telephone should look and
feel like. In short, the team that created the RAZR broke the
mold, and in the process rejuvenated the company.

The mood inside Motorola was grim in early 2003. Nokia

(Research), whose "candy bar" phone designs were all the
rage, had snatched Motorola's No. 1 worldwide market
share, and wireless operators were decidedly underwhelmed
by the models Motorola had to offer.

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FORTUNE: RAZR'S edge - Jun. 1, 2006 Page 2 of 5

The outlook was equally gloomy for a veteran Motorola

engineer named Roger Jellicoe. An Englishman who'd lived
in the Chicago area for nearly 20 years, Jellicoe had worked
on numerous Motorola phones, including the StarTAC, the
company's last monster hit, in 1996. But Jellicoe, 50, who
sports a pale-brown salt-and-pepper goatee, had recently had
a project yanked out from under him, a high-end phone
targeted for overseas markets that had been reassigned to a
Motorola design center in Beijing. He was, quite literally,
between assignments.

Fortunately for Jellicoe, another project was percolating.

Engineers in Motorola's concept-phone unit had mocked up
an impossibly thin phone - at ten millimeters, it was half the
girth of a typical flip-top - and Rob Shaddock, a senior
wireless executive, was casting about for an engineer to lead
the team that would commercialize it.

Jellicoe aggressively promoted himself for the job and in the

spring of 2003 maneuvered a dinner with Shaddock to make
his case. They met at Ferkin's, a cheerful pub in downtown
Libertyville with better-than-average food and 24 beers on
tap. In advance Jellicoe had drawn up sketches of what the More from Fortune
phone might look like (drawings that bear a striking
resemblance to the RAZR today). Midway through the meal, Top 20 global stars
Shaddock told Jellicoe the job was his.
Motorola continues to lose
Create a jewel signal
Math favors tax-free funds
Jellicoe's instructions were to create the thinnest phone ever
released - and to do it within a year. The goal was to make a - for now
splash at the next year's Academy Awards, on the last day of
February 2004. Celebrities would be seen clutching these FORTUNE 500
new prizes, and publicity would rain down on the company. Current Issue
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The phone was supposed to be something beautiful, like Special Report full coverage
jewelry - a pricey gem in the $500 range at retail, rather than
a mass-market staple. Motorola needed a reputation builder,
badly. The moneymaker phones would come after, or so the Why dream teams fail
plan went, piggybacking on the company's restored allure. Ten offbeat teams that work
The team that saved Motorola
For a Motorola lifer like Jellicoe, this task, while daunting, Can Stringer recharge Sony?
was also liberating. If the phone was never meant to be a
blockbuster - if it was in essence a high-end toy, judged on
its wow factor more than its sales - that gave him license to Sharp innovations
take some chances. The RAZR team created a phone
like no other. Some of its novel
elements:
To design the innards of a telephone takes a team of
specialists. Jellicoe, an electrical engineer, turned to an old Top tier
pal, Gary Weiss, a mechanical engineer with whom Jellicoe Side keys are on the
top half of the phone
had once designed a phone over a cup of coffee at Starbucks. instead of in their
normal place, down
The project's appeal proved to be a talent magnet within the below. Researchers said
consumers would object. They
company, and the two quickly assembled a team that grew to haven't.
as many as 20 engineers. The full group met daily at 4 P.M.
in a conference room in Libertyville to hash over the Tough call
previous day's progress as they worked down a checklist of The caller-ID panel is thinner and
stronger, using pricey glass, not
components: antenna, speaker, keypad, camera, display, light plastic.
source, and so on. Scheduled for an hour, the meetings
frequently ran past 7 P.M. Under the skin
To maximize strength while
minimizing weight, the team used
CIA-level secrecy magnesium for the housings inside
the phone.
The "thin clam" project became a rebel outpost. Money Plugged in
wasn't an object, but secrecy and speed were. Normally Most Motorola phones have three
Motorola consults closely with the wireless companies that "connectors," for power, data, and
sell the phones to try to integrate whatever favorite features earphones. The RAZR has one mini
USB side port that does triple duty.
they request. It also conducts "mall intercepts" to gauge
consumers' reaction. Smooth finish
The exterior of the phone is
anodized aluminum, a superstrong
Not this time. Jellicoe hid the details of the project even from metal that looks way snazzier than
company colleagues. plastic.

"Anytime you've got something radically different, there will Bright idea
Moto turned to a Korean specialist
be people who feel that we should be putting our resources firm to craft the super-thin metal
on other stuff," he says. keypad. Electroluminescent
backlighting added extra cool.

For cover, Jellicoe relied on Shaddock, who says, "It was a Side-by-side
kind of lock-the-door-and-put-the-key-beneath-it approach to RAZR's battery is next to the
product development."

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FORTUNE: RAZR'S edge - Jun. 1, 2006 Page 3 of 5

Digital pictures of the project were prohibited, so nothing circuit board, not beneath it, to aid
could be inadvertently disseminated by e-mail. Models of the thinness. It also makes the RAZR
wider than standard.
phone could leave the premises only when physically
accompanied by a team member. Big foot
Instead of being at the top, the
As Jellicoe's engineers focused on the inside of the slender antenna hides in the mouthpiece at
the bottom. An engineering
phone, a soft-spoken industrial designer named Chris challenge, it delivers a sleeker
Arnholt was envisioning what it would look like on the look.
outside.
Lessons from MOTO
Arnholt, 30 at the time, had joined Motorola two years
before from a design boutique in Rochester, N.Y., called 1. Secrecy limits
KEK. Ponytailed and usually dressed all in black, Arnholt distractions.
By insulating its RAZR
carries two checkbook-sized notebooks, one for writing development team from the
down things to do, the other for observations he doesn't want influence of corporate groupthink,
to forget. Motorola got an innovative product
that wowed the industry and
consumers.
"Design is really about communication," he says.
"Sometimes my ideas are tough to communicate." 2. Research isn't
everything.
Arnholt was the yin to the engineers' yang. Where they Motorola's "human factors" unit
dictated that phones more than 49
calculated radio frequencies, he pondered the curve of the millimeters wide would be deemed
phone's "knuckles," or hinges. While they bounced around uncomfortable by consumers. The
one another's workstations at the office, Arnholt escaped to RAZR team concluded otherwise.
Their only data points: their own
his tranquil apartment in Highland Park, a lakefront suburb instincts.
near Libertyville, where deer sometimes wandered into the
backyard from a nearby forest. 3. Niche products can
have mass appeal.
The RAZR wasn't designed to be a
The phone that became the RAZR owes many of its most blockbuster. It was supposed to be
distinctive elements - from its smooth aluminum finish to its a high-priced, high-end jewel to
backlighted keypad - to Arnholt's obsession with what he regain luster for Motorola. Yet with
called "rich minimalism." high demand, unit costs plunged
along with the price for consumers
- to as low as $99.
To conceptualize his design ideas, he'd bring home
prototypes made from sculpted cornstarch, and then fashion 4. Missing deadlines
and refashion their appearance, using masking tape to adjust doesn't mean failure.
The RAZR team was supposed to
previous versions. be done by February 2004; they
weren't until summer. But getting
"Chris is excellent at working the details and then refining it right meant a whole lot more
than getting it done on time.
the hell out of them," says Jim Wicks, Motorola's chief
designer.

Arnholt would then render his designs onto the page. Another designer would translate them into
three-dimensional computer graphics. And from that program, model makers in Libertyville
would craft a plastic mockup of the design.

Collaboration between style and physics

Applying the laws of physics to Arnholt's stylish sketches was an exercise in collaboration, and
not always a seamless one. Through the late summer and early fall of 2003, the engineering and
design teams began combining their work, a back-and-forth process that mechanical engineering
chief Gary Weiss aptly calls the "dance."

Arnholt began attending the daily 4 P.M. meeting, as each roadblock thrown up by the engineers
was translated into an endlessly tweaked design. As the team contemplated each feature of the
phone, every decision had a snowball effect on another feature. An antenna in one place meant an
earphone connector had to go someplace else. The team members - and often their bosses -
repeatedly haggled about what the phone should and shouldn't have in it.

Nearly every argument came down to the trade-off of functionality vs. thinness. Shaddock, for
instance, was willing to jettison the caller-ID display on the outside of the flip phone, believing it
added unnecessary thickness. Jellicoe felt otherwise: All other high-end phones had that feature.
But what might have to go to make room for it?

Two key innovations allowed the team to make quantum leaps in thinness. The first was a
Jellicoe brainstorm: placing the antenna in the mouthpiece of the phone instead of at the top. An
innovative idea, it was also a technical challenge.

Jellicoe set up a competition among five of his engineers to see who could come up with the best
design. Tadd Scarpelli, a then-32-year-old engineer who likes to take apart and rebuild car
engines in his free time, devised the most elegant solution.

The second brainstorm was rearranging the phone's innards, primarily by placing the battery next
to the circuit board, or internal computer, rather than beneath it. That solution, however, created a
new problem: width. Motorola's "human factors" outfit had concluded that a phone wider than 49
millimeters wouldn't fit well in a person's hand. The side-by-side design yielded a phone 53
millimeters wide.

But the RAZR team didn't accept the company's research as gospel. The team made its own
model to see how a 53-millimeter phone felt.

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FORTUNE: RAZR'S edge - Jun. 1, 2006 Page 4 of 5

Says Frank Stone, a mechanical engineer who worked on the battery placement: "People could
hold it in their hands and say, 'Yeah, it doesn't feel like a brick.' " In the end, the team members
decided for themselves that the company was wrong and that four extra millimeters was
acceptable.

They ended up reaching a similar conclusion about the ten-millimeter-thickness target:

Ultimately, they were able to construct a phone with all the features they wanted that measured
13.9 millimeters at the beam, exceeding the target by a little more than an eighth of an inch. Still,
that was 40 percent thinner than Motorola's slimmest flip-top phones. Everyone agreed it was
more than thin enough for the statement Motorola was trying make.

An oppressive mood in the company

As the thin-clam team made progress in combative isolation, the mood at Motorola had gone
from bad to worse. In the fall of 2003 the company lacked enough camera lenses to supply
phones for the coming holiday shopping season. The stock plunged 5 percent in September when
word came out about the camera-phone snafu.

That same month the board asked CEO Christopher Galvin, a grandson of the company's
founder, to retire. In December it further humiliated senior management by hiring an outsider,
former Sun Microsystems president Ed Zander, to run the company. Zander started at Motorola
on the first business day of 2004 without unveiling a strategy but promising to rid the company
of its hide-bound ways. He didn't let on publicly, but early in his tenure he got a look at the
ultrathin phone. He liked what he saw.

He wasn't the only Motorolan beginning to sense that this trim phone was something special.
Tom Lynch, head of the cellphone division at the time, recalls Rob Shaddock becoming obsessed
with it.

"Every time I saw him he had it in his hand, whether it was in a staff meeting or having a beer,"
says Lynch, who has since left Motorola to become CEO of Tyco's electronics business. "He was
constantly flipping it open and turning it around and rubbing it."

The phone team did have its troubles. It became clear, for instance, that it would miss the
February 2004 deadline. Perfecting the materials and appearance of the cool-blue "night
signature" of the keypad was such a sticking point that Chris Arnholt traveled to South Korea to
work with the supplier chosen to make keypads for the phone. An Oscar debut would have to
wait.

The RAZR debuts - and explodes

By the summer, almost a year after Arnholt had begun playing with prototypes at his apartment,
the phone was ready for its close-up. The thin clam had acquired a formal code name early on.
Jellicoe wanted to call it the siliqua patula, which is Latin for "razor clam." That bit of geek
humor was too much for the team's project manager, Bill Kastritis, who insisted on calling it the
Razor, as in razor thin.

The initial marketing plan labeled the phone the V3, in keeping with Motorola's naming
convention. (Previous phones were the V300, V500, and V600.) Enter Geoffrey Frost, the
marketing chief who had paid close attention as the phone project progressed.

He was enamored with what the phone could do for Motorola but couldn't bear the thought of
such an elegant device going out into the world with such a pedestrian name. Borrowing from the
team's code word, he hit on an eye-catcher: the four-letter RAZR.

Frost also orchestrated the phone's first public appearance. Motorola had privately shown models
to a handful of network executives in backroom presentations at trade shows early in 2004. But
in June, Frost's team started feeding the hype machine by offering a sneak peak at a gadget
fashion show for design-oriented journalists at Copenhagen's Arken Museum of Modern Art.

As for the official unveiling, it is industry tradition that new phones are released at a wireless
conference. Zander insisted that, once again, the plan be different for the RAZR. Inspired by the
attention Steve Jobs gets each time he debuts a new toy, Zander launched the RAZR in a splashy
presentation at Motorola's annual meeting with financial analysts in Chicago in July.

The new phone was a hit, shipping first in Asia and then with Cingular Wireless in the U.S. Yet
even at that stage it was positioned as a niche product. In the fourth quarter of 2004, out of the 29
million handsets Motorola shipped, RAZR accounted for an impressive though hardly
astronomical 750,000.

It was a new executive, Ron Garriques, who took over the cellphone division that September,
who pushed for Motorola to go large with the RAZR.

"I looked at the budget for 2005, and we were planning two million," recalls Garriques, who
previously had been head of European operations. "I said, 'We need to build 20 million.'"

How right he was. The company sold even more RAZRs than that in 2005, and projects it will
sell its 50-millionth RAZR this month.

"That's one-tenth the time it took the StarTAC to get to that level," notes Garriques.

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FORTUNE: RAZR'S edge - Jun. 1, 2006 Page 5 of 5

Zander favors a different comparison. "We'll sell more RAZRs this year than Apple will iPods."

Last July several key players from the RAZR development team were asked to appear at a
meeting of top executives at company headquarters. They weren't told why.

"Even when we were sitting in the room waiting to be called in, nobody was really quite sure
what was going to happen," says Tadd Scarpelli, the young engineer who designed the RAZR's
antenna.

Then, as the team members filed in, the executives awaiting them rose in applause, delivering a
standing ovation - followed by news that the team members would also be rewarded with a
boatload of stock options.

"It was surreal," says Scarpelli, who to this day approaches strangers in airports and asks them if
they like "his" phone. Successful rule breakers, after all, have certain privileges.

FEEDBACK [email protected]

Research Associate Susan Kaufman contributed to this article.

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