RIM leadership may have got arrogant but they also gave a great deal to the Canadian entrepreneur scene. Jim Balsillie was generous enough to give me an interview in 1999 for my book, e-Volution: How to use the Internet to grow your business. He has done his strategy very well - something I see rarely done by Canadian owner/founders.
All this talk we are hearing from the USA about how "private equity destroys jobs" and "capitalism is evil" completely by passes the fact that humans create businesses and destroy businesses. The best businesses rarely go beyond a founder's life cycle and both founders of RIM are past their peak entrepreneurial risk taking days.
There is your problem.
Where were the Board Director experts to point out this fact? As I have hammered in my blog, advisers and board directors appointed by the owners will never say what needs to be said. Have them appointed by an outsider and you will have a very different result.
1 comment:
I worked at RIM at the time, and I'm pretty sure this isn't true:
"When the iPhone came out... He told his employees nobody wanted to have a personal computer on their phone."
BlackBerry practically defined the smartphone category up to that point, and it was always about putting a personal computer on your phone.
When iPhone first came out, it really wasn't a huge competitor to BlackBerry. I think many people have forgotten that the iPhone -- a phone whose biggest selling now feature is probably the App Store -- didn't support third-party apps at all until the second version in 2008.
Post a Comment