ABSTRACT
When Research in Motion (RIM), the maker of Blackberry, was founded above a bagel store in a small Canadian city, not many people would have guessed the remarkable rise of the company. By 2009, RIM controlled half of the smartphone market, making it one of the fastest-growing and most valuable companies in the world. Today the company has less than a one-percent share of the market and its management is seriously considering quitting the smartphone business. How could a company that once ousted global giants such as Microsoft or Motorola from the market and took on the most powerful wireless carriers fall so quickly and to such depths? While many regard the fall of RIM as yet another example of how the ferocious competitive forces of Silicon Valley have overturned traditional industries, there is much more to this riveting story. As McNish and Silcoff (2015) reveal in their outstanding account of the company’s rise and fall, key to both RIM’s success and failure was a top management team that at its heart consisted of the two founders: Mike Lazaridis, a remarkable engineer who oversaw technical functions, and Jim Balsillie, an aggressive entrepreneur who headed marketing and sales. These men’s trust in their shared vision and the trust of the technical, and marketing and sales teams in their leadership brought RIM to the top of the world. But just as quickly as it promoted RIM’s rise, a fallout between Lazaridis and Balsillie over falsely backdated stock options and disagreements regarding RIM’s future strategy destroyed the trust between the two founders and opened fault lines within the top management team and between technical and marketing and sales departments. The internal feuds that ensued crippled RIM so badly that it had not much with which to counter Apple’s and Google’s entry into the smartphone market.
