(FORTUNE Magazine) – Ed Zander, the wisecracking chief executive of Motorola, grabbed his publicist's mobile phone recently and good-naturedly grilled FORTUNE about our interest in his friend Richard Nottenburg, the wireless behemoth's new chief strategy officer. "Why are you writing a story about Rich?" Zander asked. Why, we responded, did you make him your first high-level hire, and in such an important position, no less? "I felt sorry for him," quipped Zander. "He needed a job. He grows on you."

Jokes aside, Nottenburg clearly has grown on Ed Zander. For the new CEO's first seven months at the helm of the wireless giant, Nottenburg was officially a "consultant." He acted as Zander's Karl Rove--standing in the shadows and whispering in the chief's ear about what was happening throughout the ranks at Motorola. For Zander, who spent a career in the computer business, Nottenburg was a trusted aide who could be counted on for candid assessments of the new shop. Now his role, as the newly appointed head of strategy, is nothing less than figuring out what Motorola, the second-biggest supplier of handsets and a major player in every other major wireless category, is supposed to be. That makes Nottenburg potentially one of the most influential wireless executives around.

Nottenburg, 50, began his career as an electrical engineer (he has a Ph.D. from Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland) and worked on cutting-edge transistors at Bell Labs. He made a mid-career shift into academia, teaching electrical engineering at the University of Southern California, and then started a communications-oriented semiconductor company, Multilink Technology, in the 1990s. Multilink's arc from startup to IPO to almost bust gave Nottenburg some serious business chops, and he also met Zander, who, as president of Sun Microsystems, agreed in 1999 to join Nottenburg's board of directors. (Nottenburg sold Multilink last year to Vitesse Semiconductor for $26 million, a fraction of its peak bubble-era valuation.)

In contrast to the nattily turned-out Zander, Nottenburg resembles a mad scientist, complete with flowing shirttails and oversized round glasses (when he's not posing for magazine photos, that is). In his new role, he has responsibility for oversight of the company's venture capital investing, business intelligence, M&A, and overall strategy. His first piece of advice to Zander--to avoid a willy-nilly selloff of Motorola's disparate technology assets--undoubtedly endeared him to his new colleagues. Earlier in the year, "I told Ed, 'We've got to get this FOR SALE sign down,'" Nottenburg recalls. Signaling that Motorola isn't interested in quickly selling off its pieces--beyond the spinoff of its semiconductor unit, which was in the works before Zander's appointment--gives Nottenburg time to continue his study of the company. "I view myself as the outsider looking in," he says. As such, he's helping Zander stitch together a strategy to go with an existing slogan, "seamless mobility," which describes Motorola's various wireless products. He's a big fan in particular of retaining Motorola's beleaguered cable television equipment operation, a line that dovetails with his own technological background.

For his part, Zander insists that Nottenburg doesn't speak for him and that the two don't always see eye to eye. "Rich and I will scream a lot," says Zander, who has invited Nottenburg to bunk at his Chicago pad on occasion. Shouting matches with the CEO? It's tough to get closer to the boss than that. --Adam Lashinsky