Rising Star: Greg Brown, Motorola
Meet Corporate America's next generation of leaders.
By Fred Vogelstein, FORTUNE senior writer


(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.

Greg Brown, Motorola
Greg Brown, Motorola

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." Top of page

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Plus:
The war for top talent
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Most stock quote data provided by BATS. Market indices are shown in real time, except for the DJIA, which is delayed by two minutes. All times are ET. Disclaimer. Morningstar: © 2018 Morningstar, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. 2018. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile Association: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices © S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC 2018 and/or its affiliates.