The BlackBerry Problem | The Mistakes Series

Jim Balsillie, the one time co-CEO of Research in Motion, reflects on the mistake that led to the downfall of BlackBerry, once named the fastest growing company in the world. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. When you're a business owner interested in expanding to new markets, there's a lot to consider and countless questions to answer before making the call. The most important one being, are you ready? That's where ChatGPT comes in. Give it a goal, add your files, and ask Chat to help you map out different scenarios for the future of your business. So when growth is on the table, you've got an expansion plan ready to implement. Get started today at ChatGPT.com.

• 0:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 0:57Speaker 02

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• 1:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  Pushkin.

• 1:45Malcolm Gladwell?

  It dawns on all of us at some point before adolescence that there is something called "smart," and it is really rare. Only a small number of people are smart. And then, a few years later, you have an even more important realization, which is that "smart" comes in many different varieties.

• 2:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  I feel I spent my adolescence cataloging all the varieties of smart. There was my high school friend who had a mind that was a giant sponge that could soak up what seemed like an infinite amount of knowledge. Then I got to college, I met a guy whose thinking seemed effortless. He could be distracted, or procrastinating, or dancing at a party, it didn't matter. Somewhere in a backroom in his brain was a giant computer that just quietly hummed along, solving one problem after another. Oh, then I had a friend who had a mind that she'd attach to a giant V8 with like 800 horsepower. I'd never seen smart attached to energy like that before. I spent a lot of time in college working on my taxonomy of smart, and along the way,

• 2:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  I had a third realization, that every kind of exceptional intelligence has a downside, a price that person had to pay for being one of the chosen few. And every time I think of that third rule, I think of my old college friend, Jim Ballsley.

• 3:09Speaker 03

  My mistake and naivety was to think that people were with me. So you're flying around the world, you're trying to get people on side, and you think they're on side, but they're not.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  And you get blindsided.

• 3:28Malcolm Gladwell?

  My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is the fourth in our series on mistakes, inspired by Michael Linton and Josh Steiner's book, From Mistakes to Meaning. And this story is about the big mistake that changed the life of my old college friend, Jim, who I will say without reservation is possessed of one of the most remarkable minds I have ever met, and paid a price for it.

• 4:01Malcolm Gladwell?

  What was it like for you growing up? You went to, you grew up in Peterborough?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Yes, I did.

• 4:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  And you went to public high school in Peterborough?

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  Peterborough, for those unfamiliar with Southern Ontario, is just over an hour east and north of Toronto. It is to Toronto roughly what? I don't know. Poughkeepsie is to New York City.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  My dad was a tradesman. My mom was a homemaker.

• 4:29Malcolm Gladwell?

  Your high school, I suspect, was a lot like my high school. We're not talking about Exeter.

• 4:35Speaker 03

  No.

• 4:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  Although I actually, I don't mean to diss it because I got an amazing education from fabulous teachers. So what was it like to be, you were the smart kid in high school?

• 4:49Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 4:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  What was that like?

• 4:52Speaker 03

  It, I don't think they know what to do with you. So I think you're just, I think there's a premium on compliance. I think we've learned now that high-energy kids need to run around when they're young until they're tired. But kind of making them sitting at a desk all day is, when they're young, is really, really difficult.

• 5:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Are you talking about yourself?

• 5:17Speaker 03

  Yes, very much so. And it was just incredibly boring. And you just look at the clock and count minutes. And yeah.

• 5:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Did you get in trouble in high school?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, a few times. One time when I was in grade seven, a teacher did a long formula across three or four boards. And he said, where did I go wrong? And from the back of the class, I said, when you were born. And, and, and he took me out of the class and he held me up by the scruff of the neck. And I was, my feet were off the ground against a locker. And he had me taken out of the math class. And I was just, it seemed funny at the time. And then.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  And then a couple of months later, there was a, there was a provincial math contest for, you know, the 10 million people in Ontario. And as a grade seven, I'd came first in grade seven and eights in Ontario.

• 6:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  He was the best math student in the entire province, but he wasn't allowed in his own math class. What did your parents make of you?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  Uh, when I was four years old, they took me to some child psychologist, which was, uh, they didn't know what to do.

• 6:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  What were you doing at four that led your parents to take you to a child psychologist?

• 6:40Speaker 03

  I don't know. I don't know. We, we're, we're, we're kind of Presbyterian, Southern Ontario. So you don't really talk a lot. You don't sort of, you just sort of carry on. And so you, you don't, it's not like this rich unpacking of psychologist kids or something like that. Everybody's just, you know, it's kind of go play outside and you know, try, try to make it home for dinner kind of thing. Right? That was, it was a very different era, very different era.

• 7:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  In my taxonomy of smart, Jim has a whole category to himself. I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but Jim has cunning. My brain, I was beginning to understand at that time, likes to take the long way home. Jim only took shortcuts. If life was a maze, most of us stumble along, retracing our steps from one dead end to another dead end, until we finally get to the other side. Jim would see the right path instantly. Or more accurately, he would recognize that there's actually a gap in the hedge, right at the start, which no one had ever noticed before, with a straight shot to the finish. And he'd just cut through there. And by the time the rest of us stumbled to the end, he'd won the trophy, gone home,

• 7:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  changed, and was having a beer. This is Canada, remember?

• 7:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Not long after college, Jim met an engineer named Mike Lazaridis, who had a little company called Research in Motion, RIM as it was known. Jim becomes co-CEO and to the surprise of absolutely no one who knew him, builds RIM into a multi-billion dollar juggernaut. Remember 15 years ago when everyone had a BlackBerry? First real smartphone with those clickety-clackety buttons? That was Jim. So why don't you use a BlackBerry anymore? In the business school case studies about the fall of BlackBerry, there are pages and pages on the rapidly shifting smartphone landscape of the early aughts. Strategic miscalculations, the cloud of Apple, all the things that business school case studies like to dwell on.

• 8:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  But I think there's a simpler explanation. I think you need to understand something about my old friend Jim. Set the stage for me.

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Sure. It's interesting because when you talk about mistakes, and I do think the biggest mistake in my career when I look back, with RIM, we had a fork in the road. And I mismanaged the board relationship at a time where I wanted to go left and they decided to go right. And that not only changed the trajectory of the company, it changed the trajectory of the global technology industry.

• 9:42Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 10:19Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 10:52Speaker 04

  She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard, but then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.

• 11:07Speaker 05

  Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one? It could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexiprazole 2mg, the first FDA-approved treatment for this condition. Rexulti is proven to reduce agitation symptoms. Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment. Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke. Report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur. Learn more about these and other side effects at rexulti.com. Tap ad for PI.

• 11:42Speaker 04

  I'm glad I asked for help.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Ask your loved one's doctor about Rexulti.

• 11:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  So tell me, what do you mean by you wanted to go left and they wanted to go right? And we're talking about what? First of all, let's date this. What era are we talking about?

• 12:00Speaker 03

  We're talking 2011, and a couple of things were going on. One, our hardware business had grown a lot, but it was under pressure, huge pressure. And there were new operating systems, one from Apple and one from Google. They were putting tremendous pressure on our hardware sales. But our services business was where we made all our money, our messaging services. So at that year, 2011, we had more profit from our services business than Facebook had total revenue at that time.

• 12:37Speaker 06

  We're going to talk about BlackBerry, the beleaguered smartphone maker.

• 12:40Speaker 07

  BlackBerry CEO himself has admitted one of the reasons they're struggling is because they didn't innovate fast enough.

• 12:47Speaker 00

  Let me give you like 2012 prediction. We're the company that brings us the BlackBerry. I'm predicting that they are going to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

• 12:55Malcolm Gladwell?

  There were two sides to BlackBerry in those years. There was the phone, that rectangular plastic block with a physical keyboard. And there was also a messaging function, BlackBerry Messenger, BBM. That was what Jim is calling the service business. Hardware and services were separate. And Jim thought that BlackBerry should get out of the physical phone business, which wasn't making any money anymore, and just be in the BlackBerry Messenger business.

• 13:22Speaker 03

  And so I'd spent a year and a half buying companies to avail a service, to make it an open service. And I'd spent time with the carriers and they were going to launch it with SMS, call it SMS 2.0. And it had storage and rich media functions.

• 13:42Malcolm Gladwell?

  What he was imagining was turning BlackBerry Messenger into the backbone of the entire smartphone ecosystem.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  So it's effectively what we know of as social media right now. And there was a small emerging player called WhatsApp that worked cross-platform. But we had a multiple of users as they did. And so, yeah, I'd beavered away on it. And I thought the board was on side. I thought everyone was on side.

• 14:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  Apple had just come out with the first iPhones. Jim was thinking that there was no way little BlackBerry, as fast as it was growing, could compete with Apple or giants like Samsung. But BlackBerry Messenger was a different matter. BlackBerry was dominant in that space. And in the version of the world Jim imagined, your texting and social media would come bundled with your wireless contract. So the minute you hooked up your new iPhone or Samsung phone to a wireless provider, you'd be using BBM. Stop there and let's go back. And I want to make sure everyone understands what we're talking about here. So is in 2011, many of us still have a BlackBerry?

• 14:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  And there's two components here. There is the physical phone. And there's also, you're talking about a service that could live, a messaging service that could either live on a BlackBerry or live anywhere.

• 15:14Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 15:15Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. That would be the equivalent of what WhatsApp became? Is that the mess model?

• 15:22Speaker 03

  Facebook and WhatsApp became, that's correct. What at the time was BBM effectively was social media. And the difference would be is it would be in your subscription plan as part of your texting, rather than an ad-supported social media service.

• 15:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  Yeah. So that the goal here or the play was to make the BlackBerry services business, the backbone of basically new media, of new social media.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  That's correct. And it would be embedded in your cellular plan. And I worked with the carriers, the major CEOs throughout Europe, and already had two of the big three committed in US. So all you need is enough to keep it going and it eventually tips. So yeah, people would have said, I'm migrating to an Android. I'm migrating to an iOS. I'll just take my BBM with me. I'll maintain all my contacts, all of my. And you remember you had digital, you know, voice over IP happening on those things at that time. You had pictures, you could store them, you've established groups. You had status of delivery, all the things that were social media that was emerging at that time. We had that in the BBM.

• 16:41Malcolm Gladwell?

  Well, how many users, BBM users, did you have at the beginning of 2012, say, or the beginning of 2011?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  Eighty million.

• 16:49Malcolm Gladwell?

  Eighty million. So you, what would you put the probability of of BBM becoming the dominant, becoming this kind of dominant player in the telecommunications world if you had gone that route? Do you think you could have, how big do you think you could have grown it?

• 17:07Speaker 03

  Well, the probability that it would have stayed a major force is 100%.

• 17:13Malcolm Gladwell?

  That's the vision he pitches to the board. We're trapped in the maze along with everyone else. Here's the shortcut. Was he right? Of course he was. Jim's always right.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  So, yeah, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, when you reach a fork in the road, you gotta take it.

• 17:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  So you go, tell me about the board meeting. You go to the board, you go to the board and what happens?

• 17:42Speaker 03

  Well, they, we'd had, the board had brought in consultants. And I was explaining this and presenting this and talking about the strategy, thinking they were with me. And really, I was just speaking into just a vacuum of receptivity and interest to it.

• 18:09Malcolm Gladwell?

  Why weren't they with you?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  I think it was too radical, what I was trying to do. I had not spent near enough time with them explaining it and debating it, and which is a lesson I learned. And you've really driven the company's strategies for 20 years to a $20 billion company. And you, you think you, they'll just follow you.

• 18:40Malcolm Gladwell?

  They say, what are you talking about? We're a company that makes phones. And SMS 2.0, Jim's vision for the next stage of BlackBerry, is killed just a few weeks before it was supposed to launch.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  I wasn't consulted. I didn't know it was happening. It was just on the agenda, presented and decided. And I called the lead director after that and I said, what, what's going on here? This will kill the company. And they say, the decision's made. And so I

• 19:15Speaker 03

  I resigned from the board and sold my shares, the remaining shares at that time. And they were extremely confident for a year and a half, marketing campaigns, Super Bowl ads, lots of declarations of its future and its success. And it's going to be great. And there was just one board member who was from the tech industry and from the telecom industry, who called me and said, there's nothing I can do to stop it. This is madness. And yeah, and it was just jaw on the floor. I just never experienced anything like that. And I didn't see it coming. And how could somebody be so blind to something like that?

• 19:59Speaker 03

  When it's such a consequential decision.

• 20:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  We'll be right back.

• 20:14Speaker 00

  This is Jacob Goldstein. With ChatGPT, you can do more than get answers. You can get things done. When you're running a business and looking to expand, you need a clear view of the landscape before making any decisions. ChatGPT can help you prepare. Connect your Google Drive, point to relevant files and reports, and ask it to research competitors, industry forecasts, and market signals. It can turn the findings into a strategic deck in your team's template that you can review before presenting to your leadership team. Growing a business is ambitious, and ChatGPT can help you do it with confidence. Get started today at chatgpt.com.

• 20:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  This is Malcolm Gladwell from Revisionist History. In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.

• 21:25Speaker 04

  She'd throw things, wander, and started hoarding. Mom's Alzheimer's was already so hard. But then we found out she had agitation that may happen with dementia due to Alzheimer's disease. And that was a different kind of difficult. So we asked her doctor for more help.

• 21:40Speaker 05

  Seeing symptoms like these in a loved one? It could be time to ask their doctor about Rexulti, Rexiprazole 2mg. The first FDA-approved treatment for this condition. Rexulti is proven to reduce agitation symptoms. Rexulti should not be used as an as-needed treatment. Elderly people with dementia-related psychosis have increased risk of death or stroke. Report fever, stiff muscles, and confusion, which can be life-threatening, or uncontrolled muscle movements, which may be permanent. High blood sugar can lead to coma or death. Weight gain, increased cholesterol, unusual urges, dizziness on standing, falls, seizures, trouble swallowing, or sleepiness may occur. Learn more about these and other side effects at rexulti.com. Tap ad for PI.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  I'm glad I asked for help.

• 22:17Speaker 05

  Ask your loved one's doctor about Rexulti.

• 22:23Malcolm Gladwell?

  Jim and I both went to Trinity College at the University of Toronto, which was, and still is, the smallest and the snobbiest of the colleges that make up the University of Toronto. I met Jim in the first few weeks of freshman year. I had just turned 17. I'd just had eye surgery. So I had a huge scar running down the side of my face, a massive afro, lots of acne, maybe 110 pounds, and all the wrong clothes. I was from a small town way off in the countryside. Here I was at swanky Trinity, and I had no idea how the fancy kids dressed and no money to do anything about it. I had a moment of truth. I need to figure out how to fit in. Jim lived across the hall from me. He taught me how to play backgammon.

• 23:07Malcolm Gladwell?

  I played endless games of touch football with him. I had a beloved jade tree that I called William F. Buckley, and he used to steal Buckley from my room and put him in some perilous place. And I think the reason that I felt a certain affinity with Jim is that I sensed he shared my urgency about fitting in. Only, it was going to be much harder for him than me. First of all, he was from Peterborough. Nobody was from Peterborough. He had further to climb. And second, he was really, really ambitious. I mean, I was ambitious, but not like Jim. Jim wanted it more. Do you remember? What was it like when you came to college, to university?

• 23:50Malcolm Gladwell?

  What's your account of your kind of first year at Trinity?

• 23:55Speaker 03

  Well, it was very intimidating. I found these people from tremendous privilege and just very, very intimidating and meeting people with stellar backgrounds. I'd never been on an airplane. I'd never been outside of Ontario. Very modest background. Yeah, just tremendously intimidating. But I mean, I was smart, but then you'd see Robertson Davies at high table and sometimes his friend Northrop Frye there. And it's like, Dorothy, this is not Kansas anymore.

• 24:26Malcolm Gladwell?

  Just so you know, Robertson Davies and Northrop Frye were two of the biggest Canadian intellectual celebrities of that era. And we'd see them out our window, walking through the college quadrangle. God, out for a stroll. For those of us from the sticks, this seemed unbelievable. So we, just to remember, you and I, you were across the hall in our second year. And I remember there were, how many people were on our floor? Thirteen people on our floor or something like that? I remember telling my dad, I can't.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Max, max.

• 24:59Malcolm Gladwell?

  Max, maybe 12. It was like private school kids and kids who went to Upper Canada College, you know, and kids who went to... It was, did you feel like you had to work harder to prove yourself in that world? What was your kind of cycle?

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I worked all the time. As a kid, I had five or six paper routes, four or five paper routes almost all the time. And then I got summer and winter jobs from grade seven on. I bought my own clothes. I still to this day have my own pants and darn socks. Yeah, I can darn socks with the best of them. I sew my own buttons on because you learn how to do it. And I'll sit there, watch the news and sew up my clothes all the time. It's very, very funny. I just enjoy sewing and, but I always sewed. I had my own clothes. I stitched in my shirts. I darn socks. Yeah, it's a funny thing, right? And when something rips, I'll... Yeah, my wife says, why don't you buy me a pair of sweatpants? I said, well, I can fix those. And it's very funny.

• 26:04Speaker 03

  So I'll sit there with a big thing and do a catch stitch on it. And yeah, and so you work all the time. And then you, you go to school and you, you know, I would, I would do the math club and I'd go to basketball. And then I'd go out to a party and then I'd work all weekend. So yeah, I just, I just, I work every day.

• 26:25Malcolm Gladwell?

  Jim went off to Harvard Business School right after graduation. He could have gotten a job anywhere, but he chose RIM, right near where I grew up in Waterloo, Ontario. And RIM's rise was swift.

• 26:38Speaker 03

  It's important to understand that, that Apple launched the iPhone in January 2007. And in response, there was a very aggressive selling and marketing and device function.

• 26:56Malcolm Gladwell?

  Apple supercharged the smartphone category. The same way Starbucks supercharged cappuccinos. And in the beginning, RIM was able to ride that wave.

• 27:06Speaker 03

  So when they, they launched in 2007, we were three billion sales. The next year we grew to six. The next year we grew to 11 billion. The next year we grew to 15. The next year we grew to 20 billion. Fortune had us in the middle of that time, the fastest growing company in the world.

• 27:23Speaker 07

  Smarter and sleeker. Now with real time turn by turn GPS navigation. It has the intelligence you require with the beauty you desire. The all new BlackBerry Curve.

• 27:35Malcolm Gladwell?

  I would drive through Waterloo in those years and see building after building after building with the big RIM logo on it. Even today, my mom lives across the street from a giant recreational center donated to the city by RIM back in that era, RIM Park. It is impossible not to have a certain amount of pride and affection for the guy who used to steal your jade tree and ended up a billionaire. And then, at the very height of BlackBerry's success, Jim wanted to go left and the board of directors wanted to go right. But Jim, B, this is a good moment for a reflection here. How are they not with you? You've built this thing.

• 28:16Malcolm Gladwell?

  You've been the strategic force behind this extraordinary company. You're, you know, the device is in the hands of the President of the United States. I mean, like, how is it that they could look at, that they would see what you had done for the company and look at, come to this crucial fork in the road and not even, they don't even seem interested in your option.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, Mike and the new CEO, Thorsten, didn't. They were hardware people. And Mike did say, right in the end, in a meeting, before the board meeting, if we do this, it'll kill hardware. And I said, hardware is already dead. And it's like I told him his dog just got hit by a car.

• 29:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  When you look at your, what you did, where do you think the mistake lay?

• 29:12Speaker 03

  I think it's many things that you're touching on. One is, for sure, you're busy because you're flying around the world trying to enact this shift. I underestimated how a strategic shift is hard for people. They, you'd much rather have a continuum. Yeah, more time, for sure. More preparation, more persuasion. I did not spend the time I needed to. I had always driven the decisions and they'd always been, yes, of course, we'll do what I'm pushing. And, but ultimately, the board held the power.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  So underestimated their power, underestimated how they were sold in their way of thinking.

• 30:00Malcolm Gladwell?

  If we cut to the bottom line here, is you, you have a...

• 30:06Malcolm Gladwell?

  A notion of where the company's future lies, which turns out in retrospect to be accurate, right? Yours was the only path. There was no path. The right word fork in the road was only going to lead to disaster. There was no path that BlackBerry was going to emerge a winner by focusing on hardware.

• 30:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's no, there's no debate on that now. Yeah.

• 30:27Malcolm Gladwell?

  There was at least a decent probability it could have come out on top, or at least very healthy in the other path. You had, you came up with this idea. You had enormous amount of intellectual confidence in the accuracy of your decision. But what you, what you overestimated was that you thought that having a great idea, well supported by evidence, would be sufficient to win over a group of intelligent people. And what you discovered was, actually, no. A room full of allegedly intelligent people need more than an intellectual argument to win them over.

• 31:08Malcolm Gladwell?

  They need to have, you need to go out to dinner with them seven times and at a lovely restaurant and hold their hand and kind of, you know, make them feel like they're wanted and needed and that you're someone who they can trust, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That was the, it was all that soft stuff that you underestimated the importance of. You thought it was

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Big time.

• 31:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  What you needed was, what you needed to be, you thought what was, what was most important was to be right.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, yeah, no, I do a lot kind of in, I do a lot in public policy and my wife makes a joke. She says Jim's motto is why convince when you can confuse?

• 31:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  By the way, what's Jim doing as all of this is going on? Trying to buy a National Hockey League franchise. The Pittsburgh Penguins in 2006, the Nashville Predators in 2007, the Phoenix Coyotes in 2009. In each case, the franchises were struggling financially and Jim proposed to move them to a big city in Southern Ontario called Hamilton. Was Jim right to want to do this? Of course he was. Southern Ontario is home to 14 million people and at present has just one hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, which is absolutely bananas. There could easily be three or even four more franchises in the Toronto region and

• 32:33Malcolm Gladwell?

  each would be more successful than almost any franchise in the entire league. But could Jim convince the other owners to let him do it? No, he couldn't. I'm wondering, isn't the Penguins' story a version of this? That that was another case where you were right. The Penguins should not be in Pittsburgh. The Penguins should be in Hamilton, right? You are 100% correct. The future of the league, this is a terribly run league by a bunch of idiots who have not understood that Canada is the natural home for, has way too few hockey teams. And Hamilton is, would be 100 times better as a home for the Penguins than Pittsburgh,

• 33:18Malcolm Gladwell?

  right? So in both instances, the story of Blackberry's fork in the road and the story of the Penguins, you are correct. And in both instances, you cannot convince the board, in one case, the rest of the owners, and in the other case, the board of the company, they, you cannot convince them of the 100% accuracy of your position. Had you done this-

• 33:42Speaker 03

  No, I think they're different because one just was never meant, one was a, was just never meant to be. It wasn't ever, they weren't going to allow it to happen.

• 33:51Malcolm Gladwell?

  Was it never going to happen? Is the one blind spot in the otherwise sublime mind of a man like Jim, that he can't see how he could have made it happen? You were, let me, let me, let me, let me just, I just want to, one last point about Pittsburgh, the Penguins. I'm going to imagine a completely different Jim. Imagine, I'm going to, imagine if you are the schmoozer of schmoozers. You are the most kind of gregarious, backslapping. You're everyone, you know, you're like this beloved, social blah. You spend, and you had wined and dined and got to know every single owner in the NHL.

• 34:31Malcolm Gladwell?

  And then you had said to them, you buy the Penguins and then you say to them, guys, this is a bad hockey market. I think, let me talk to you about a future of the league where blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. Is there not a version, you can't do it because that's not who you are. But imagine a version of yourself where I shave off 40 IQ points and I give you a beer belly and an aw shucks like, you know, and an endless appetite for martinis and steaks. And I send you on a tour of all the good old boys who run NHL franchises. Do you get your way if you do it that way, if you're that person?

• 35:10Speaker 03

  In hindsight, I don't think, I say no chance.

• 35:14Malcolm Gladwell?

  Come on, really? Oh, come on, Jim. This is your mistake. This is your blind spot. Doesn't this drive you, why is it, why am I the only one who's driven crazy by this? They're morons. They're morons.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Well, it would have been very, very profitable. There's no question. We had the facility and we had the real estate. Yeah, it would have been very, very profitable.

• 35:36Malcolm Gladwell?

  Greatest concentration of hockey fans in the entire world with hockey fans with money in an underserved market who can't get any tickets to the Toronto Maple Leaf.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Well, that's, that's the math. That's the math.

• 35:47Malcolm Gladwell?

  Several times during our conversation, Jim used the word heretic to describe the way other people at RIM, the board and everyone else viewed him. And I think it's the perfect word. The heretic is the person who strays from the orthodoxy, but not quietly or passively. The heretic does it loudly without regard for everyone else's sensibilities. I said at the beginning that when Jim and I came to Trinity from the sticks, both of us were engaged in the project of figuring out how to fit in. We came in with chips on our shoulders and we had to find a way to remove them without calling too much attention to ourselves. I think I was better at that than he was.

• 36:30Malcolm Gladwell?

  My jade tree, William F. Buckley, kept getting stolen because in 1980s Canada, to openly affiliate with a conservative like William F. Buckley was a provocation. So when I got a second jade tree, I called it Run D.M. Tree. I put the lyrics on the side of the pot. "I'm a sucker jade tree, can't grow much higher. All you other jade trees can call me sire." And no one ever stole my Run D.M. Tree. There were simple ways to appease the orthodoxy. But I don't think Jim really ever wanted to appease anyone. I think he just wanted to find the hole in the hedge. It's how he got out of Peterborough. It's how he made his way to Trinity.

• 37:10Malcolm Gladwell?

  It's how he turned a little startup into a juggernaut. There's a famous psychology experiment from the 1950s where infant monkeys are taken from their mothers and given a choice between two inanimate surrogates. Cloth mother, a toy mother monkey that's soft and cuddly, and wire mother, a surrogate made out of steel wire, holding a banana. Which do they choose? Cloth mother. They went for short-term comfort over long-term survival. At the end of the day, I think the rim board wanted a cloth mother, and Jim was wire mother.

• 37:52Malcolm Gladwell?

  They weren't rejecting BlackBerry Messenger, they were rejecting Jim. And maybe Jim's mistake was simply that he didn't understand that for the rest of us monkeys, a banana isn't enough. Revicious History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Nadaf Hafry. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Angelie Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo Di Allavera.

• 38:37Malcolm Gladwell?

  I'm Malcolm Gladwell.

• 38:45Malcolm Gladwell?

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• 39:14Speaker 06

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