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Olive: RIM’s co-CEOs need to go
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The Toronto Star-By David Olive
The biggest crisis in corporate governance today is unfolding at BlackBerry maker Research in Motion Ltd.
Try to put aside the recent BlackBerry service blackout, the plunging RIM share price, and the takeover rumours. None of these are unfamiliar events in the history of the Waterloo, Ont. firm. Its share-price swoons date from the dot-com meltdown of March 2000.
Focus instead on RIM’s leadership. It needs to be replaced, kicked upstairs or otherwise removed from decision-making, and from setting the vision and priorities for thousands of RIM employees.
It’s long been the case that RIM is led by co-CEOs, in this case tech wizard Mike Lazaridis and business manager Jim Balsillie.
Look around at all the successful firms run by co-CEOs. Can’t find any? Right. The two-headed CEO model has never worked. Even Dave Packard and Bill Hewlett weren’t co-CEOs at Hewlett-Packard Co. when that iconic firm was creating Silicon Valley.
In advance of the ill-fated PlayBook launch this year, RIM sacked two ad agencies and watched helplessly as a parade of its marketing experts defected from the company. They were worn down by the “internal war going on around the marketing message,” as someone close to the company was quoted at the time.
RIM’s co-CEOs could not agree on who its PlayBook was for – RIM’s traditional enterprise customers, or for the vast retail market. And worse, one senses RIM really didn’t try to puzzle this out, because the co-CEOs’ hearts were never in a tablet.
Or in a game-changing smartphone like the iPhone.
There came a disruptive industry moment in the mid-2000s – the uptown word for it is “inflection point” – when RIM’s near-monopoly on smartphones for business and professional (enterprise) users was about to be jeopardized by the development work Apple Inc. was doing on its iPhone.
And talk of tablets, crude versions of which had been around for ages, was turning serious. If tablets could be perfected, and they surely would be, they would be the death of conventional PCs.
As earlier noted in this space, at the time of that imminent transformation of RIM’s bread-and-butter smartphone into a multifunctional device by Apple and other rivals, RIM was distracted by a long-running patent dispute and a back-dated stock-option scandal.
And the co-CEO’s extracurricular activities were almost too numerous to count. Balsillie was absorbed in one of his three failed attempts to bring an NHL franchise to Hamilton, and was also setting up otherwise laudable non-profit research institutes.
Lazardis, meanwhile, was mid-wife to the Perimeter Institute, a world-class facility for pure rather than applied physics research – an apt metaphor for Lazaridis’ resistance to risking the purity and security of RIM devices with seamless Internet access, video streaming and music and game playing functions.
When RIM finally was compelled to plant its flag in a consumer market vastly larger than its core enterprise client base, it repeatedly bungled, mostly because it has lacked the commitment of a true believer.
Author and veteran Fortune columnist Stanley Bing describes in his latest column how cumbersome the iPhone continues to be as a text-communication device, with its tiny, user-unfriendly keyboard that “limits the medium to such messages as OK, Huh?, and WTF.”
Yet Bing, a CrackBerry addict, acknowledges that “the BlackBerry is hopelessly lame as a media tool” for the consumer market, which demands and gets from the iPhone ready Internet access and flawless music and games playing functionally.
When the BlackBerry “tries to do anything in that department,” Bing wrote, “it seems like one of those parents who attempt to be ‘hip’ by getting stoned with their teenagers.”
Apple generally gets a share of the blame for RIM’s woes. After all, that much larger firm has unsurpassed new-product development prowess and marketing skills.
But the blame for RIM’s decline rests entirely with RIM’s board.
RIM had a decade’s warning that customers would stop lugging around a BlackBerry, a cellphone and a PDA the moment they no longer had to. A multitasking, or all-in-one, device was on the horizon. It simply wasn’t in the genes of RIM’s co-CEOs – and scientific purist Lazaridis especially – to build a decent one.
Lazaridis and Balsillie have been running the modern RIM forever. For some years now they’ve been running it into the ground. Hope for RIM’s continued independence is fading.
And that slender hope rests on the replacement of the current co-CEOs with a sole leader. A leader who embraces a dynamic future with missionary zeal, dissatisfied with the cautionary steps that for too long have passed for vision at RIM.
With precious few exceptions, when you have two CEOs, you do not have a CEO.
We see this with the latest RIM disaster, the ill-fated PlayBook tablet, shaping up to be the biggest flop in RIM history.
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