As a young boy, Bertrand Cambou got to tag along with his father on a business trip to Phoenix, where the elder Cambou lobbied Motorola to erect a plant in their hometown of Toulouse, France. Bertrand's father, a professor at the University of Toulouse, helped sell the idea, and Motorola opened its first overseas plant in Toulouse in 1968.

"I said, 'I want to work there,' " Cambou recalls. It took a few years, but he finally ended up doing just that. Starting off at the Toulouse facility, Cambou moved on to the company's U.S. operations and, 15 years later, had risen to chief technology officer within Motorola Inc.'s semiconductor unit.

Cambou, who is now the president and chief executive officer of Spansion LLC, the flash memory subsidiary of Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Fujitsu Ltd., is one of many electronics industry executives who cut their management teeth at Motorola's chip division and went on to become C- or V-level bosses at successful, usually smaller, companies.

While other corporations — Fairchild and National Semiconductor come to mind — have spawned startups, Motorola is unique in spinning out so many high-level managers while at the same time, at least in the past decade, struggling with its own place in the world. The irony is not lost on those who have put the lessons learned at Motorola to use at new companies (see list, below).

"You felt you were a part of the business itself," said Carl Schlachte, who began his career as a Motorola engineer/trainee and is now chief executive officer of ARC International. "I believed I was going to retire there from the day I started."

What Motorola taught, its alums say, was a focus on customers and relationships, a respect for the work force and a strict sense of responsibility. At the same time, the Moto vets assimilated a cautionary tale: the need to carefully manage their companies' growth so that inflexibility and market myopia don't creep in.

Motorola's semiconductor operation began to assume legendary status in the 1960s, when the company skyrocketed to success on the strength of its one- and two-way radios and other communications devices. Lester Hogan, a Harvard professor, came on board and brought with him a number of innovators later dubbed "Hogan's Heroes," after the popular television program of the time.

"Motorola was a great incubator, because people generally would be there a good time to hone their skills," said Wilf Corrigan, a Hogan's Hero who left Motorola to run Fairchild Semiconductor before starting LSI Logic Corp. in the 1980s. "Motorola had a good training program, which was unusual for Silicon Valley at the time."

Indeed, training at all levels was something of a companywide obsession. One program put college-graduate engineers through rigorous training and, eventually, a rotation through various product departments before they settled into a role. An executive development program took managers into the desert near Tucson, Ariz., for a monthlong stint — six days a week of intensive training on philosophy, accounting, business practices and the like. Programs on such a scale are virtually unheard of today.

In the late 1960s, "You rotated into four separate areas, three months in length. When that was done, you'd take a job somewhere in one of your rotation spots," said alum Tom Hart, now the CEO of programmable-logic vendor QuickLogic Corp. "The training program brought in a collection of really strong folks and gave them a strong bench."

Canny managers snatched appealing prospects as they rotated through their departments. This, said Hart, was how he reeled in John Bourgoin, now the CEO of MIPS Technologies Inc., and Don Schrock, who was president of Qualcomm Inc.'s ASIC division before retiring in 2003.

"You could make an investment in people and assume they'd be around for a while," Corrigan said.

There was also a corporate tendency to throw young engineers into the deep end. Corrigan was 24 years old when Hogan tapped him to run the company's transistor operation. Cambou, too, said he was put in senior positions "before I was ready" for them. "At one point I was the only corporate officer under 40. They invested in my development," said Cambou, who was hired at AMD by another Moto alum, AMD chairman and CEO Hector Ruiz. Ruiz, a 22-year veteran of Motorola's Semiconductor Products Sector, declined to comment for this story.

MIPS' Bourgoin, for his part, still recalls the rigor of the quarterly operations reviews at Motorola. Managers were called in to defend their businesses and explain design wins and what their competitors were doing. "These guys were harsh in their judgment," Bourgoin recalled. "You never walked out of these meetings feeling you had everything under control." The reviews forced managers to get their ducks in a row, and "you always learned a lot from doing your homework," he added.

It may seem counterintuitive, but many Moto alums say the company's bifurcated culture — split between Chicago, where the corporate parent was headquartered, and Phoenix, where the IC operation resided — worked to their advantage. The Midwest provided "a conservative culture and a thoughtful, progressive management approach," said Semiconductor Industry Association president George Scalise, whose last job at Motorola was running its European operations. "As you came out to the West, you had this whole new approach that took place in the Valley: young, unstructured, far more aggressive. What came out of that period was a blend of the two: a good, solid conservative management that emanated from Chicago and a more aggressive element that came [to Motorola] from the West Coast."

Whatever the ingredients, veterans say that a culture of creativity seemed to thrive and to seed innovation in the 1960s, '70s and '80s. Indeed, the atmosphere could be downright entrepreneurial.

If Dave Packard's and Bill Hewlett's personalities dominated Hewlett-Packard Co. for decades, the personality of Bob Galvin affected executives on the chip side at Motorola. "It could be six months before you saw him [Galvin], and he'd recall details about a conversation you had months before. You'd throw yourself on the train track for him," said Jack Browne, a 19-year Motorola vet who is now vice president of global sales for MIPS.

When quality became an issue with U.S. manufacturing in the 1980s, that became Galvin's hobbyhorse. "Galvin would go to a meeting and you had to talk about quality first," said Brian Gardner, who rose to general manager of the microcontroller division and is now a product manager at Denali Software Inc. "At first, as you talked about something other than quality, he'd leave the room. That kind of thing permeates the organization."

But many of the strengths were also inherent weaknesses, said some alums. While Corrigan sees an inflection point in IBM's awarding the PC microprocessor contract to Intel in 1981 instead of front-running Motorola, other structural flaws amplified as the company got bigger.

During Hart's tenure, the company had 26 business units, each with its own profit-and-loss accounting. "And all of the fixed costs, purchasing, HR and so on, were allocated out to the P&Ls," the QuickLogic CEO recalled. "So you had to figure out how the allocation system worked and game it."

The culture of the individual had a flip side as well. "There was a culture of 'well, we don't want to thwart the individual,' " said Gardner of Denali. "But when things weren't focused on and people were working on brain-dead projects, it ate into people. Intel has a quote: Disagree, but commit. That was missing at Motorola."

In the early 1990s, the Semiconductor Products Sector moved from Phoenix to Austin, Texas, which shook a lot of people up. As competition intensified, the semiconductor unit mounted a reorganization that focused on product segment, rather than customers and the relationships nurtured over the years. "It took all the crosstalk out of the system. That made it very difficult to execute on your business," said ARC CEO Schlachte. "The focus was not so much about the customer anymore."

As Cambou sees it, the culture that had fostered innovation and creativity even as the company grew from a few hundred million dollars a year to multibillions seemed to be getting winded. Originally, "Motorola had a recipe: training, coaching, processes, caring for people and the entrepreneurship," he said. "Then Motorola went into tribal war. Each of the smaller pieces was starting to fight with each other during those leadership changes. This is when something was lost, in my view. The balance was switched to a big corporation's philosophy. Then entrepreneurship got squashed."

Moto maxims

Design for the customer's problem.
"I was arguing with a fellow in the Communications Division. He said, 'Perhaps you don't understand what business you're in. We're in the business of giving people the ability to communicate, not the ability to buy radios.' When you think about it that way, it's very different."
— Tom Hart, CEO, QuickLogic Corp.

Solve the customer's problem, regardless of time/space continuum.
"One of the things you had to do is man the Bat Phone. There was an 800 number customers could call. My favorite question was a 70-year-old lady in Chicago whose Motorola radio stopped working. They got out of that business in '68, but Motorola expected you to see that problem to resolution. You had to track down the tube somewhere and go fix it for her. If that's your first exposure to being in the business world at 21, you carry that through the rest of your life."
— Carl Schlachte, CEO, ARC Int'l

Don't be afraid to throw young managers into the deep end.
"When [Lester Hogan] put me in charge of the transistor operation, I was 24 years old. He did that with a lot of people in Motorola. He said, 'We're going to make these plastic transistors. How much capacity do we need to put in place?' I didn't know. I was a kid."
— Wilfred Corrigan, chairman, CEO, LSI Logic Corp.

Insist on integrity and respect for the individual.
"Uncompromising integrity went out of style but it's making its way back, and respect for the individual is what holds business together."
— Brian Gardner, product manager, Denali Software Inc.

It's about people.
"When it got to the level of senior account manager at Motorola, it was about relationship sells. You were tied into personal relationships with your customers."
— Andy Jaros, vice president, North American sales, ARC International

Don't make life too comfortable.
"Have a healthy, spirited discontent."
— Jack Browne, vice president, worldwide sales, MIPS Technologies