Ms. Dugan, though coming from Washington, already speaks the language of Silicon Valley. “It’s a small, lean and agile group that is unafraid of failure,” she said, and it will “celebrate impatience.”

She is hiring metal scientists, acoustics engineers and artificial intelligence experts. They will work for her for only two years so they feel a sense of urgency, she said, an idea she borrowed from Darpa, where people wear their resignation date on their name tags.

Motorola has been spending too much money on too many different cellphone components, said Mark Randall, whom Google recruited to run Motorola’s supply chain from Amazon.com, where he did that for the Kindle. He said he planned to jettison suppliers and buy 50 percent fewer components.

How to get people excited about Motorola phones when shiny iPhones are on the next shelf?

Gary Briggs, who ran consumer marketing at Google and now does so at Motorola, is working on advertisements that he said would be more like Google’s — simple and emotional. They will focus on Motorola’s storied past and the ways the products are better than the competition’s, like battery life.

“We have a right to compete in this market,” Mr. Briggs said, “and I think we’ve got to prove why we’re going to build and bring devices to people that are worth talking about again.”

Competitors like Sony, LG and HTC will be watching closely to see how the Motorola-Google relationship develops, especially whether Motorola receives special treatment from Google. Like Motorola, they use the Android mobile operating system, for which Google receives no payment.

“They certainly don’t believe Google’s going to keep a Chinese wall in place,” Mr. Kindel, the former Microsoft manager, said of the other cellphone makers. “The reality is people work together, they can pick up the phones and talk. There is going to be an advantage.”