Motorola

Although it has lost a few battles, Motorola has taken on the Japanese head to head, through these times of Japanese competition. In the 1980's Motorola controlled the emerging U.S, Market for cellular phones and pagers but they weren't aggressively focused on competing with the Japanese, even though Japanese firms began to flood the U.S. market with low-priced, high-quality telephones and pagers, leaving Motorola pushed into the background. This is when Motorola "heard the call to battle." Managers at first were not sure how they should respond, so they originally decided to abandon some business areas and even considered merging their own semiconductor operations with those of Toshiba. After a lot of searching they decided to fight back and regain the firm's lost market position. This fight involved two main strategies: First learn from the Japanese, and then compete with them. To carry out these strategies, Motorola executives decided to to set a number of broad based goals that essentially committed the firm to lowering costs, improving quality, and regaining lost market share. Managers were then sent out on missions, mainly focused on Japan, to learn how to compete better. Some manager even observed Motorola's own Japanese operations to learn and understand how it fully functioned; while others focused more on how other successful Japanese firms operated. At the same time, the firm also drastically boosted its budget, R&D, and