Robert W. Galvin, Who Ushered Motorola Into the Modern Era, Dies at 89

By ROBERT D. McFADDEN

Published: October 12, 2011

Robert W. Galvin, who took the reins of Motorola from his father and built a family-run business that pioneered Depression-era car radios and wartime walkie-talkies into a global maker of color television sets, cellphones and other ubiquities of the electronic age, died early Tuesday in Chicago. He was 89.
His family announced the death, providing no other details.
From arm-weary days as a stockroom apprentice in 1940 to the midlife pressures of the executive suite and an autumnal retirement-in-name-only as chairman in 1990, Mr. Galvin spent his working life with Motorola, leaving it only for military service in World War II. By the time he stepped down, he had transformed the company from a moderately successful postwar enterprise into a high-tech international giant in a fast-changing, highly competitive business.
One of America’s most visionary entrepreneurs, he led a company that developed cellular phones, pagers and other wireless devices; produced police radio systems, hearing aids and semiconductors for consumer electronics; and laid foundations for missile guidance systems and satellite communications.
The keys to success, he often said, were the foresight to exploit new markets; diversified, high-quality product lines; and progressive management. He practiced them by giving priority to new technologies, moving into Asian and European markets, enforcing quality controls and customer-satisfaction goals, and establishing early profit-sharing plans for employees.
In the three decades after Mr. Galvin took control in the late 1950s, annual sales leaped to $10.8 billion from $290 million. Motorola, based in Schaumburg, Ill., built factories, hired thousands of workers, expanded its products and set high standards for innovation. Wall Street applauded, employees pitched in, and Mr. Galvin was often compared to leaders of I.B.M., General Electric and other corporate giants.
There were mistakes. Motorola began making color TV sets in 1957, before color programs were widely available (although it brought them back in the 1960s to set an industry standard). The company gave up too soon on flat-screen computers, and it squandered billions on a satellite communications system that could not compete with ground-based technologies.
But Mr. Galvin was the force behind a company that forged trends in radio, television and integrated circuits for computers and other products; sent communication devices to Mars aboard Viking probes and to the Moon on manned rockets; and produced smaller, ever-more-efficient cellphones that, for better or worse, have put much of the talkative world in constant touch.
“He had this amazing ability to see what was coming down the pike,” said Harry Mark Petrakis, a novelist and short-story writer who has produced books about Motorola, its leaders and its founders, Paul and Joseph Galvin.
Robert William Galvin was born in Marshfield, Wis., on Oct. 9, 1922, the only child of Paul and Lillian Guinan Galvin. He grew up in Chicago, where his father and uncle had founded the Galvin Manufacturing Corporation in 1928, and in suburban Evanston, where he graduated from Evanston Township High School, a top student who excelled in debate and drama and was class president. He attended Notre Dame and the University of Chicago briefly, but quit college at 18 to work for his father’s company.
The company had begun by making “battery eliminators,” devices to plug radios into electrical systems in homes and cars. (Radios were originally battery-operated.) By 1940, Galvin Manufacturing had evolved into America’s premier maker of car radios and two-way radios, called Handie-Talkies. After World War II broke out they became walkie-talkies, and the Army bought $10 million worth. Galvin also prospered in government contracts for radar systems.
During the war, Robert served in the Army Signal Corps. In 1942, his mother was killed by robbers who had invaded the Galvin home in Evanston. With her death, inheritance taxes forced the family to take the company public in 1943 with the sale of 40,000 shares. Joseph Galvin, in charge of labor relations and production, died in 1944, leaving Robert as sole heir. The same year, Robert married Mary Barnes.
In 1945, Robert, who had worked in all the factory and business departments, was named a director. In 1947, the company changed its name to Motorola, a fusion of motor and Victrola. It also set up a profit-sharing plan for employees and began making television sets. During the Korean War, Motorola made mobile radio equipment and began to develop microwave-relay communications systems.
Mr. Galvin became president in 1956 and took over day-to-day operations from his father, who was chairman and chief executive until his death in 1959. The son succeeded him in both posts, and in the 1960s embarked on new paths: guided missile designs, space communications, radios for ships and aircraft, components and integrated circuits for TV sets, car ignitions and hundreds of other products.
Motorola produced the first hand-held mobile phone in 1973. In the 1980s, after Mr. Galvin showed one to President Ronald Reagan, the White House supported open competition for portable phones instead of an AT&T monopoly. Motorola later dominated the cellphone hardware business.
While leading a fight to open Japanese markets to American goods, Mr. Galvin adopted Japanese quality-control methods. In 1981, Motorola set a goal of making 99.99966 percent of its products free of defects. It cost millions to train 150,000 employees, but it sharply increased sales, particularly for cellphones.
Mr. Galvin is survived by his wife of 67 years; his daughters, Gail Galvin Ellis and Dawn Galvin Meiners; his sons, Christopher and Michael; 13 grandchildren; and 10 great-grandchildren.
Mr. Galvin, a tall, soft-spoken man who was a member of various corporate boards and government and industry trade organizations, gave up Motorola’s chairmanship in 1990, but continued for more than a decade to serve on its board and advise his son, Christopher, who succeeded him in 1997. Christopher Galvin resigned in 2003 after Motorola surrendered its edge in cellphones and lost billions in a satellite communications venture, Iridium, which could not compete with the spread of ground-based cell networks.
For Mr. Galvin, it was a disappointment, but taking risks and distrusting conventional wisdom had always been his guiding principle. “If it’s intuitive, it’s probably wrong,” he told a leadership symposium. “The absolutely distinguishing quality of a leader is that a leader takes us elsewhere.”
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