Fruit salad

Research in Motion was on top of the world. The Canadian technology firm’s keyboard-equipped phones had become a defining part of the corporate zeitgeist. They were standard issue for strivers who could now double-thumb their email responses from anywhere.1 The truly dedicated and fashion-indifferent would even holster the clunky devices on their waists, treating them like a detective might handle his service weapon.

With its tight control of the network infrastructure, the company promised IT departments a level of security and reliability other providers couldn’t match. It helped pioneer push delivery, eliminating the need to check for new messages. Instant notifications presaged the Pavlovian situation that grips people everywhere today, earning its flagship product the nickname of CrackBerry.

At one point global market share surpassed 20%, and by 2009 RIM was considered the fastest-growing company in the world. The consumer-focused phones Apple and Google were introducing were viewed as toys, which couldn’t be a true threat to the BlackBerry’s position atop the technology mountain.2

The name derived from its most distinguishing feature: tiny keyboards whose buttons resembled the densely packed surface of the eponymous fruit. Although touchscreens were beginning to capture public attention, management decided to double down on what it knew best. Even when it became clear that the iPhone might be onto something, with its full touchscreen and minimalist approach to buttons, RIM’s management leveraged its expertise in creating products that appealed to its rabid user base.3

For the BlackBerry a slowly brewing momentum shift exploded rather quickly into a wave that swamped its market. Smartphones became a universal tool, used for much more than circumscribed business purposes. As RIM was built from the ground up for the previous communication mindset it was unable to make the transition, despite technical capabilities and relationships established over years of serving the enterprise customer. Products intended to regain relevance were at best glitchy misfires, arriving too late to make any difference.

Goal orientation

Part of the collapse stemmed from leadership’s focus on the activities that historically made up the daily work of the organization. In RIM’s case perfecting the physical keyboard, keeping tight control over the network infrastructure, and owning the corporate sector were the main tasks, and employees executed on them.

These were fine things to do, just no longer relevant in accomplishing the overall mission of the company. These didn’t lead to the desired outcomes, because management failed to cross the right bridge. The delicate chain of reasoning that connected RIM’s thousands of employees to its overall objectives broke in several places:

  • The market of the future was not defined by the business customer
  • Miniscule keyboards were no longer the best way to interact with a device, plus tapping out emails was not the most important function anymore4
  • Tight control over the complete ecosystem was less valuable than a freer, innovative marketplace of applications
  • Focusing on efficient code and saving bandwidth was irrelevant in a world of fast and cheap data plans

Organizations often start with a worthy goal and hit upon a set of actions that get them there. The world shifts in critical ways, the connection between activity and goals becomes fuzzier, and they respond by doubling down on the same set of actions.5 After a while these places are full of people doing work because it was once important, it was the reason they were hired, and they have been conditioned to only that.

like a bridge over troubled waters

The challenge is to recognize that we care about outcomes but can only control specific inputs, and success comes from linking the two correctly. This applies equally to organizations operating on a global scale and individuals planning their daily tasks.

A retailer wants to set fashion trends, but the daily work involves designing and manufacturing clothes. A nonprofit aims to raise literacy, but it spends its energy developing specific curricula. The medical system wants healthier patients, but the specific action is advice, medications, or surgery. You need greater overall fitness but can’t get it directly—the inputs you can affect are diet and exercise.

If the theory bridging action and outcome is misunderstood, the system falls apart no matter how diligently you execute on tasks. As RIM discovered the connection to their true objectives was crumbling, and momentum could only carry them along so far until crisis hit.

Connect the dots

In the case of BlackBerry (or Enron, or J.C.Penney, or Dewey & LeBoeuf) mistakes are retrospectively obvious, but that kind of insight is cheap. Nothing is future-proof, but testing the logic in the moment helps ensure your mental model is consonant with reality, especially critical in those case when the livelihoods of thousands of employees ride on the quality of your decisions. Walk through three simple questions to ensure that you’ve built the most robust chain possible:

  1. Is the goal the right one? If your mission is to wire up a city with landlines, how will that matter once everyone has a mobile device? If your organization exists to bring clean water to a certain population, what happens when that goal is achieved? If you were established in the aftermath of a World War to help rebuild nations from the rubble, why do you exist once that’s pretty much handled?6
  2. Does my work get us there? What is the thread that ties together the actions you and your team perform every day to the overall mission, even theoretically? Can you see how that PowerPoint presentation or yet another cut of the Tableau data yields a useful result? Will knowing the result of that analysis influence an action in any way? Establishing and communicating these connections is a powerful way to sustain motivation in the trenches, and conversely lacking it saps energy, and risks dislocation when reality reaches you.
  3. How do I know I’m moving in the right direction? What indicators will tell you that your assumptions are correct, even directionally? If a new product will revolutionize the marketplace, does a rudimentary version at least make a splash? If the plan involves waiting months or years before confronting reality directly, you had better be on the right path. Better to identify some specific indicators along the way that provide room for course correction.

As for BlackBerry, its stock price chart currently resembles a normal distribution and the company is a shadow of its former self.7 After organizational shakeups and multiple rounds of layoffs it has settled on a niche in back-end enterprise technologies, of the sort that are becoming more important as the internet’s tentacles extend into more areas of commerce and the risks of rogue actors becomes higher.

But it’s not the next Apple, and Canadians will have to look elsewhere for another homegrown player to dominate on the world stage. Hopes of making the company’s headquarters city of Waterloo, Ontario into a local version of Silicon Valley are on hold for now.

What theories underpin your work, and how sure are you that they will lead to your desired outcomes?

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References

Toronto’s Globe and Mail wrote How BlackBerry blew it.

BlackBerry market share from Gartner via Statista.

  1. The phenomenon became so intense that some developed a condition known as “Blackberry thumb”, like carpal tunnel syndrome but restricted to one digit. ↩
  2. Google and Apple took very different approaches. The former developed the open Android system for other manufacturers to use, while the latter maintained exclusive control over tightly-coupled hardware and software, an approach that is just minting money. ↩
  3. Those growing up in the touchscreen world won’t grasp just how strange it was to have a phone without buttons. Perhaps we’ll look at the first driverless cars without steering wheels the same way. ↩
  4. Making TikTok videos is where it’s at these days. ↩
  5. Hence the cliché about doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results. ↩
  6. In the case of the World Bank, you pivot to eliminating global poverty, which will always be both important and unachievable, as utopias never materialize. ↩
  7. Research in Motion became so identified with its product that it changed its name to BlackBerry, unfortunately just as the device itself was falling to zero market share. ↩