Angry Birds Attack the Leadership of RIM

RIM is getting whacked for its leadership reshuffle. The market remains unimpressed.
Running even a profitable business is no guarantee that last year's performance will be repeated. Customers need to be convinced again. Retailers need to be encouraged. employees need to be motivated. Alliances need to be maintained.
Margaret Wente writes harshly about the RIM leadership and gives a scathing indictment to the two billionaires. She probably has a point and someone should have been telling these two to focus on their business and check out apps.

Back in 2007, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie were like gods. Everyone agreed the Research in Motion CEOs were the two smartest guys in Canada, and possibly the entire world. Anyone who was a someone owned a BlackBerry. A BlackBerry meant you were a player. Even Barack Obama had one! But even if you didn’t, you cheered for RIM because finally we could forget the hideous national embarrassment of Nortel and hold our heads up in the world. Thanks to them, our whole country was a player!

When Roman emperors paraded through the streets in triumph, they used to hire a slave to whisper in their ear, “Remember, you are just a man.” Maybe Mike and Jim should’ve tried that.

When Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in 2007, Mike Lazaridis trashed it. He told his employees nobody wanted to have a personal computer on their phone. Back then, RIM commanded nearly half the U.S. smartphone market. Today, it has more like 10 per cent. Not only do people like to have computers on their phones, they also like to waste millions of hours playing Angry Birds. Who knew?

The worse things got, the more arrogant they became. Last spring Mr. Lazaridis walked out of a BBC interview because he didn’t like the question. “You implied that we have a security problem; we don’t have a security problem,” he said. “We’ve just been singled out because we’re so successful around the world. It’s an iconic product, used by business – it’s used by leaders, it’s used by celebrities, it’s used by consumers, it’s used by teenagers – we were just singled out.”

Then there was all that money. Funny things happen to people who get stupendously rich. Instead of dreaming night and day about the next great product, they start to dream about building the most spectacular mansion in the entire country, or buying a National Hockey League team. Mr. Lazaridis’s construction project (a 24,000-square-foot “cottage” on the shores of Lake Huron) has been going on for years. Mr. Balsillie spent three years haggling for the Pittsburgh Penguins, the Nashville Predators and the Phoenix Coyotes.

Meanwhile, Mr. Jobs was dreaming up hit products that people would line up overnight to buy. As Toronto money manager Tom Caldwell said, “Once the CEO is building the maxi-yacht or the great mansion or trying to buy hockey teams, he is not paying attention to his business, in my mind.”

Mr. Jobs despised tech billionaires who acquired mansions and fancy toys. “I’m not going to let money ruin my life,” he told his biographer. He had no taste for “that nutso lavish lifestyle that so many people do when they get rich.” The trouble is that people who get rich get fat and soft. They’re not hungry any more.

Mr. Jobs knew that if you stop swimming fast enough, you die. He was a screaming perfectionist who cursed out his staff when they moved too slowly, or when some product detail wasn’t good enough. Meanwhile, last year, when RIM released the PlayBook, which was supposed to compete with Apple’s iPad, it was a miserable flop: It couldn’t do e-mail. It had no Skype, no GPS, no Angry Birds. As a New York Times tech reviewer wrote incredulously, “There’s no app for that.” It wouldn’t even fit into the breast pocket of a jacket.

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Where was RIM's Board of Directors?

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.

Lessons from the recession for business owners

When I worked at a strategist for a bank and wrote the speeches for the CEO, who was also the founder, he would confuse me with his insistence on always bringing up complacency. As a young MBA with my career before me, I could not see wasting time on such a mundane topic which seemed more of a downer and something your mother would say. 

As I look back, I realize he was wise with his observation that success brings complacency and complacency brings failure.

Lesson from the recession: Run your company during boom times as if times were lean.

We have heard many leaders bemoaning that their companies would be far more successful if they had run them during the boom period as they are running them now. Without question, success can bring complacency. However, the best leaders we know resist this tendency. Their companies’ cultures foster continuous improvement and cost-reduction regardless of great performance.

Similarly, the advice we often give entrepreneurial and family business owners is, “Run your company as if you are preparing to sell it in three years.” This means eliminating under performing employees (which can be difficult, even when done with great care and consideration, but is critical), and building cost-cutting and improvement initiatives. These efforts will grow EBITDA and result in a more successful, resilient and valuable company.

As for my old boss, his bank is still in business, having survived the derivatives madness, and has achieved its vision to be global. 

Complacency is indeed the key word to put in all your leadership speeches.

Barry McKenna on how Canada can be competitive

How to get the Canadian economy to grow is on everyone's priority list. There were 65 recommendations made by Red Wilson's panel set up to make recommendations.
My time in private equity has shown me that "Growth and innovation" is an attitude.
Canadian business owners have managed to tuck in behind the American economy and grab a good enough market share, but not build its own global winning companies.
Here is an excellent article by Barry McKenna in the Globe and Mail discussing the problem on business innovation further:

Putting Canada on a more competitive footing will likely mean diversifying trade links beyond the U.S., converting corporate profits into world-beating innovation and pursuing big infrastructure projects. It also means welcoming more foreign investment from places such as China and the Middle East and deregulating a host of stodgy pre-Internet industries, such as telecommunications, cable and transportation.Such a campaign has a long way to go – as is highlighted by the comments of foreign investors like Naguib Sawiris, the Egyptian telecommunications tycoon. It was his money, controversially, that helped fund the startup of Wind Mobile in this country. In an interview with The Globe and Mail this week, he blamed Ottawa’s telecommunications policy for making it harder for new wireless companies to establish themselves. “Anybody who asks me, I tell him look, we are the stupid investors that poured a billion dollars into Canada here and created 1,000 new jobs, please don’t do this mistake. Don’t come here,” Mr. Sawiris said. He also drew a direct link between the long-standing federal policy of limiting foreign investment and the lack of global presence of Canada’s major telcos.

“If they were that good, why are they just in Canada here? Why don’t we have Rogers in the U.K. or Germany? Why is Vodafone everywhere? Why is France Télécom everywhere? And this national champion Rogers is only in Canada? Because only in Canada it gets pampered and it can kill its competitors.”

A push for reform

In 2008, an expert panel set up by the Harper government to examine Canada’s competitiveness recommended a major shift in Ottawa’s approach to telecom, in favour of opening it up to far more foreign investment. Three and half years later, the chairman of that panel, Red Wilson, looks back on his effort with a mixture of pride and regret. Pride because his panel’s findings are just as relevant today as they were then. But it’s tinged with disappointment because most of the 65 recommendations, including the one on foreign ownership of telecom companies, remain on the shelf even as the country’s innovation and productivity performance sputters.

Can I sell my company even if it is not profitable?

The question of the week is one asked by many of my clients:


Can I sell my company even if I have not made any profit the last couple of years?

The answer I give is a whole-hearted, "Yes!" 

You can always sell your company. The correct question though is: Will you receive a value sufficient to satisfy your personal objectives? 

Many of my clients have become used to withdrawing capital from the company and once profits erode, become nervous and think that they need to sell before profits decline further. This is where valuation and sale of your business by a professional EMD or corporate finance expert will make a significant difference. 

Although your historical EBITDA certainly is a factor, the value will depend largely on what EBITDA you can prove for the future. If, for example, you have landed large new contracts, you likely will be able to get value for most of the EBITDA that those contracts will generate over the years to come. 

I suppose the tougher question here is: Why are you selling your company now? If you have no choice, then you should prepare the best you can, potentially hire a broker  or Exempt Market Dealer to help you tell the story, and get the best value possible. 

If you don’t have to sell now and you think the future looks better, you likely will get more value if you wait. Taking on 30% sale to Private Equity would be your best option. They will fill up the tank again, revitalize your strategy and get you looking at what options you have - most often, hiring a CEO and encouraging you to do the work you love to do.

Jacoline Loewen is a Director of Loewen & Partners Inc., an Exempt Market Dealer, specializing in finance for owner operators and family businesses, specifically acquisitions, restructurings, sales, successions, strategy and private equity financing.

Jacoline began her career with Granduc Mines, Northern BC, and then Deloitte in their strategy unit. She developed a strategic planning model and published it in a book called "The Power of Strategy”. She also wrote "Business e-Volution" and “Money Magnet: How to Attract Investors to Your Business” (Wiley), which has been used by Ivey as a text book.

She is a Director on the Board of the Exempt Market Dealers Association (EMDA) responsible for brand and communications. She is on the advisory board of DCL International, Bilingo China and Flint Business Acceleration. She has been a Director for other Boards such as the Strategic Leadership Forum.

She is a regular panellist on BNN: The Pitch, a contributor to the Globe & Mail and National Post, serves as a judge for the UBC and the Richard Ivey School of Business’ Business Plan Competitions and is a guest lecturer at Ivey and Rotman Universities. Jacoline holds an arts degree in Industrial Relations from McGill University and a MBA from the University of the Witwatersrand.  Her MBA thesis was selected by Cambridge University and published by Cambridge’s Engineering faculty.