Social Computing Comes To Stock Activism: Motorola's Turn?

Eric Jackson is at it again in getting popular support for a "plan B" for Motorola (MOT). His plan is a solid list of ideas that focuses mostly on the very incompetent management under Ed Zander and a sleepy, do nothing board.

Best of all the plan is editable in wiki style as shown in the above link. This is a real opportunity to not just get people to pledge shares in some kind of online proxy war but to get their energy and ideas to flow into supporting the effort as well.

We’re intrigued for two reasons:

1) we’ve been hugely unimpressed with Zander since we saw him at MIT two years ago when he made it clear he could not work the controls on the phones he was trying to demo and had to literally throw it off the stage to a waiting assistant who knows how to work the devices Ed attempts to show interest in and
2) the ability to aggregate individual shareholders in this way is a potentially very powerful way to impact corporate governance and business in a way that many of those in conventional seats of power may not fully appreciate.

There are only so many movies that Michael Moore and others can do about GM (GM), Enron and so on. If individuals can effectively work together in this mode it will create new ripples in the public equity markets that tie in with new auction-model IPO efforts and greater innovations in equity research (something near and dear to our hearts!).