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Rising Star: Greg Brown, Motorola
Meet Corporate America's next generation of leaders.
 (FORTUNE Magazine) - To get ahead in corporate America, headhunters will tell you to do two things: Beware of Silicon Valley, because big-company execs don't do well there. And if you do get the chance to be a chief executive, hang onto the title -- another chance may never come along. Greg Brown, 45, has broken both rules, and his strategy is paying off. He left a fast-track job at Chicago's Ameritech in 1999 to become CEO of Micromuse, a 10-year-old software firm in San Francisco, and took it from $22 million to more than $200 million in revenues.
Four years later he went to struggling Motorola (Research) -- as an executive VP. What gave him the confidence? It runs in the family. His older brother by 13 years is Dick Brown, former CEO of EDS and Cable & Wireless. Brown is good at fixing things. He grew Motorola's $6.7 billion government and corporate communications-equipment business by 10 percent a year and doubled its profitability. "We did it mostly with a more disciplined rollout of new products and by more tightly managing our R&D spending," he says. He also laid off about 3 percent of his 20,000-employee division and replaced all 12 of his direct reports. He boils his philosophy down to three words: listen, learn, lead. It means you need to understand your business down to the nuts and bolts, let your employees know you won't have all the answers, and focus on just a handful of truly crucial things, even though dozens seem just as important.
He's being watched. Says John Thompson, a vice chairman at Heidrick & Struggles: "He's no longer a hidden talent. If Motorola doesn't broaden his responsibilities this year, they're going to risk losing him. He has the personal bandwidth to be CEO of a FORTUNE 50 company."
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