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How management has failed at RIM
By Joe Castaldo | January 19, 2012 Update: On January 22, Research In Motion announced that Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie would step down as co-CEOs and co-chairmen of the board of directors. Lazaridis will now be vice chair of the board, and head up a new innovation committee. Balsillie will become a director. Their replacement as CEO is Thorston Heins, formerly RIM's chief operating officer for products and sales. Barbara Stymiest, who became a director in 2007, will now chair the board. Investors reacted negatively to the news, with RIM shares opening 5% lower on the NASDAQ on January 23. Is it all falling apart? It seems an absurd question to be asking about a company like Research In Motion, Canada’s most successful and influential tech firm. Just how successful it would become was hard to imagine when Mike Lazaridis set up shop in a tiny office above a strip mall in Waterloo, Ont., in 1984. Jim Balsillie joined eight years later, bringing with him the sales and strategy muscle to take RIM’s products to the world. Together, they were unstoppable. They turned RIM into a global powerhouse that delivered mobile e-mail to the masses, sparking a revolution in mobile communication and defining the smartphone as we know it. Under their stewardship, RIM continues to rake in billions in revenue each month and attract new subscribers at a time of fierce competition. But somehow, lately, something’s gone terribly wrong. A deep-rooted dysfunction seems to have overtaken the company. Balsillie and Lazaridis have so badly lost the confidence of the market that investors and analysts no longer seem to care about the billions in revenue or the 35% increase in subscribers over the past year. The highlights of 2011 are almost too painful to mention: the PlayBook, RIM’s first tablet, was a flop; its latest line of BlackBerry