| Jim Balsillie is a dreamer. Mike Lazaridis is a pragmatist who ensures all the business inputs – building processes, engaging employees, enabling decision-making and much more – are in place. As co-CEOs of Research in Motion they are a fusion of thinking and doing. Together they have made the BlackBerry synonymous with wireless email and in the process created the sexiest, most user-friendly business tool since the calling card/stock ticker.
Ask Balsillie about RIM’s success and he’ll tell you it’s the product of a single goal: "we do one job but it is a big job, and that's mobile convergence."
Balsillie and Lazaridis may like to define their focus in the simplest of terms, but describing the BlackBerry as just a ‘mobile convergence’ tool is like saying the Mona Lisa is just a painting.
What turns the BlackBerry into a blockbuster is Research in Motion’s ability to frame their goal through the lens of the customer. RIM, for instance, concentrates on meeting the needs of existing customers – the market they understand best – by constantly monitoring customer-feedback loops and modifying its product, service and applications just as often to meet those changing demands.
“What I found,” says Lazaridis, "is if you concentrate on the quality of your product, and you listen to your customers," then the company will prosper.
And as in other remarkable companies, every one of the dozen or thousands of concepts, preparations, alignments, connections, corrections, discoveries and concrete actions involved in accomplishing a goal or task is seamlessly undertaken and suppliers and customers connected. That in a nutshell is also Jim Balsillie’s job.
“You navigate cascading circumstances,” Balsillie said of how he guides his company during an October conference at the University of Waterloo on the future of the workplace. "The goal is to get down a 20-mile river – that's the long-wave thing. But the next goal is not to crash into that rock 10 feet ahead."
Complexity, after all, is often just an infinite number of simple steps. |
