Blackberry maker Research In Motion had an awful 2011, losing three-quarters of its market value and further ground to competitors on Google, Apple and even Microsoft’s platform. But after founder/CEO Mike Lazaridis and co-CEO Jim Balsillie resisted public calls to change course or resign their posts for so long, now that they’ve done both, it’s still something of a surprise.
New RIM CEO Thorsten Heins. Photo courtesy RIM
The formal announcement will come Monday, but it’s official, confirmed in an extended multi-party interview with Toronto’s The Globe and Mail: Lazaridis and Balsillie will resign as CEOs, making way for Thorsten Heins, currently RIM’s COO of Product Engineering.
It’s not uncommon for a COO or another top executive within a company to step in as acting or interim CEO while the board of directors searches for a replacement. But Heins isn’t talking like he’s an interim anything, and Lazaridis and Balsillie are framing Heins’ succession as an orderly and permanent transition, a passing of the torch from RIM’s founder to a new generation — more like Tim Cook replacing Steve Jobs at Apple than Tim Morse filling in between Carol Bartz and Scott Thompson at Yahoo.
Balsillie told The Wall Street Journal that the timing was right to transition to new leadership and that the co-CEOs had recommended the changes themselves to the board. According to the WSJ, board members and other executives confirmed that neither CEO was pushed out.
“In every successful company that’s developed by founders,” Lazaridis told The New York Times, “there comes a time when it enters a new phase of growth and it’s time for the founders to pass the baton to new management.” Lazaridis also told The Globe and Mail‘s Iain Marlow that he had found it difficult to relinquish control over the company he founded, but added, “the bigger mistake is waiting too long.”
Meanwhile, Heins was confident: RIM is “a fantastic growth story and it’s not coming to an end,” he told Marlow. “What you will see with me is rigour and flawless execution.”
Heins hasn’t been an especially high-profile executive at RIM. Like Lazaridis, he’s an engineer and product designer, responsible for RIM’s hardware and software. He’s been given credit for helping RIM’s Blackberry become popular in the developing world, one of the main growth areas for the company.
Both Heins and Lazaridis are closer to the engineering side of the business than Balsillie, who joined RIM as co-CEO in 1992 and was charged with corporate strategy, business development, marketing, sales and finance. RIM currently has no chief marketing officer, and Heins says one of his first tasks as CEO is to hire one to help rebuild the company’s brand.
Lazaridis and Balsillie will stay on with RIM in a nonoperational capacity as board directors. Director Barbara Stymiest, former director of the Toronto Stock Exchange, will become the board’s new chair, and major shareholder Prem Watsa will also join as a board director.
Heins offers continuity with RIM’s history, but also a chance to change elements of its strategy. For example, Heins emphatically says that he is open to licensing RIM’s new QNX operating system to other smartphone or tablet manufacturers. RIM had resisted this approach in the past, apart from very general statements. But several analysts have argued is the company’s best option to boost revenue and grow its platform.
The theory is that handset makers may be willing to incorporate RIM software partly to gain access to popular features like Blackberry Messenger and the company’s popular enterprise solutions, and partly to have an alternative to Google’s Android freed from pesky and expensive patent claims from the likes of Microsoft.
But it’s hard to say how popular a proposition that would be to manufacturers or customers until QNX actually ships on a smartphone — which won’t even happen on a Blackberry device until late this year.
The launch of the first Blackberry smartphones featuring QNX will be Heins’ first real test as CEO. Even though QNX’s acquisition, its flubbed launch on the Playbook and delayed launch on handsets were the consequence of decisions set in motion by RIM’s now ex-CEOs, by doubling down on QNX, Heins now owns that platform. That includes owning those decisions and their consequences from now on.
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