Petryk's Picks

"BLACKBERRY" by Rod McQueen



Reviewed By William Petryk, CMA

It is regrettable that a country as advanced our own has so few home grown global enterprises. We are capable of much more. Finland, a much smaller nation with less than 1/5th of our population, has Nokia. Now that Nortel is being liquidated, Canada is left with only one company that can be considered to be both on the forefront of research into cutting edge technology and also a successful global enterprise. That firm is Research In Motion (RIM) and if our nation is to advance in the field of high technology, then knowing how this company started and developed is important to our future economic growth. In learning this story we can extract lessons to modify our industrial policies so that other new firms have equal chances to develop and grow. For these reasons I want to recommend reading BlackBerry by Rod McQueen and published by Key Porter Books.

Mr. McQueen has previously written books about Confederation Life, Eatons, and Manulife. He has now turned his talents to relate how Mike Lazaridis, a young Greek immigrant from Turkey, started a small electronics company in Waterloo, Ontario. This small firm eventually became RIM and is the company that invented and is now producing the ubiquitous BlackBerry. As with any startup organization, the success of RIM was never certain. There are things in common with other great startups, such as Apple, that should be noted. One is the leadership skills of the founder. Mike Lazaridis was a visionary with superb engineering skills but, of equal importance, he was aware of his own limitations. For this reason he hired the best and brightest at the University of Waterloo and pursued others in whom he recognized great abilities. One such person was Jim Balsillie who became the chief executive officer.

Another factor to success was the resources of the University of Waterloo. It was one of the first schools in Canada to offer a co-op program in which students could attain credits by working for local companies. It enabled them to get practical experience along with what they learned in the classroom. As well, its professors were allowed to keep the proceeds of any development. The result was the birth of a new business incubation centre similar to that of Stanford in California.

Finally, the importance of funding cannot be discounted. Apple Corporation would not be the enterprise it is today if it did not have the benefit of angel financing by Mike Markkula Jr. The early years of RIM were extremely lean. Their first office was a 500 square foot room on the second floor of a strip mall near the University. Funding came from Lazaridis's own parents and a Student Venture Loan from the Ontario Government. Later funds came from the sale of shares, a loan from the Ontario Development Corporation (ODC), and Ericsson, a Swedish telecommunications giant. The company continued to pursue other sources of funds wherever it could find them. RIM spent years trying to stay afloat and it was not until after the BlackBerry started to dominate the market in wireless communications that it no longer required external financing to grow.

There are many lessons in this story that every Canadian should be aware of. The book is an interesting read and also relates the many pitfalls that can demolish a small startup company. Readers of different backgrounds will glean other facts from this story, such as the contribution of Jim Balsillie's expert marketing. Many can benefit for the facts presented in this book.

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