by Charles Plant | Oct 2, 2013 | Leadership Development
If you thought it was bad when Blackberry had two CEOs, you would not be surprised to find out how much worse it got when they had three.
When Thorstein Heins was made CEO and Balsillie and Lazaridis still sat on the board, the company effectively had three different CEOs with three different visions.
Balsillie was enamoured with the potential of BBM being licensed more widely but Lazaridis and Heins ganged up on Balsillie and killed his BBM initiative. This caused Balsillie to resign from the board and sell all his stock. (Good move by the way.)
Meanwhile Heins and Lazaridis were battling over the keyboard-less Z10 versus the Q10, a QNX based Blackberry with keyboard. Lazaridis had long thought that trying to compete directly with the iPhone was sheer folly given Apple’s 6 year advantage in the market.
Heins won that battle, much to the company’s detriment as history has proven the product to be too late and too complex.
So there you had it. Three CEOs each with a different vision. As it happens, both Lazaridis and Balsillie were right and had there been only one CEO, Blackberry might still have a future. But as it was, the third CEO won and the company is now fighting an uphill battle.
Thing is, there can only be one vision.
by Charles Plant | Oct 1, 2013 | Leadership Development
I must admit that I used to think that having Co-CEOs at a company was a good idea. It certainly looked good when Balsillie and Lazaridis were running RIM successfully a few years ago. But Saturday’s article in the Globe and Mail on the fall of Blackberry certainly cleared up any doubt about Co-CEOs.
As you might imagine, things just went swimmingly for the two of them as long as they agreed on strategic direction. One key to their earlier success was having Co-CEOs, with Lazaridis focussing on engineering, product management etc and Balsillie managing sales and finance.
But that structure began to fail as the firm grew. “The structure made it difficult to get definitive decisions or establish clear accountability.” This slowed things down enormously.
And then strategic differences began to emerge with Balsillie favouring a push to licence BBM to carriers fro use on other phones. Meanwhile Lazaridis was trying to recreate the Blackberry with a new operating system. It can’t have been easy working there with duelling visions.
We’ll never know just how much having Co-CEOs brought about the downfall of Blackberry. But I can bet that companies will be hesitant to try it again. There can only be one vision and this usually means there can only be one leader.
by Charles Plant | Sep 26, 2013 | Leadership Development
I’ve always looked for people to emulate, someone who is a master networker. Today I read a story in Inc. Magazine about someone who would win the title hands down.
Problem is that I can’t imagine anyone emulating his habit of working 16 hours a day and making hundreds of phone calls a day.
The worst part is that he targets someone he wants to meet and he is relentless in trying to reach that person. He’ll call an assistant multiple times trying to get through, not taking no for an answer. In total he might have to make half a dozen attempts to get through to someone.
This is something I just can’t do. If this is what it takes to be successful as a networker, even a mild version of this, then I give up.
by Charles Plant | Sep 24, 2013 | Leadership Development
Dear Social Media
I’ve been meaning to ask you a few questions about networking. Thing is, I’m a bit confused about social media as a way to network.
It’s like I’ve entered a big room where I know a few people and now I have to meet the rest.
This big huge room seems to be mostly full of people who are talking at me, not with me. Can you imagine walking into this big room and finding that:
- Lots of people want to tell you stories about their cats.
- Others are trying to impress you about what they had read recently.
- Some are trying to drag you outside to sell you something.
- Many are just sitting there watching everyone else.
Come to think of it, you, my dear Social Media are coming to resemble a high school dance with the show offs, jocks, socialites, dweebs, nerds and wallflowers all playing their prescribed roles.
With all this noise going on in the dance hall, how do you find someone new with whom you want to have conversation? How do you network in a world where everyone’s talking and few are listening?
Best regards
Charles
by Charles Plant | Sep 23, 2013 | Leadership Development
I had lunch with an old friend on Friday and I realized this morning that getting together for lunch qualified as networking. I hate networking but really enjoyed lunch. What’s up with that?
Until today I thought of networking as attending events and wandering around talking to people but what I realized is that I’ve been thinking of it all wrong.
I hadn’t realized that having lunch with old friends and spring-boarding from there to meet new friends is actually more what it is all about.
This has forced me to re-examine the whole nature of networking. What is the purpose of networking? Is social networking really networking? What’s the best way of doing it? Are you always networking?
One thing at a time. Perhaps first I better figure out the purpose of networking. I trolled a few sites to figure out what other people were saying. For some reason much of what I read came down to using networks to find a job or find a customer. That seems rather crass doesn’t it?
I would prefer to think of it as building relationships and learning. Over the past two years I’ve learned an incredible amount from the people with whom I’ve networked. Along the way, I’ve met new people, some of whom I’ve done business with.
In Seth Godin parlance, I’ve been finding my tribe. Maybe if I see networking in this new way, as a way of building relationships, I won’t hate it quite as much.
by Charles Plant | Sep 20, 2013 | Leadership Development
I’m back fretting about this issue of leadership again given some of the research that we’ve done recently. You might have noticed from the most recent research that lots of people pick ‘Management’ as the thing they like least about their job.
At the same time, less than 1% say that ‘Management’ is what they like most. Maybe leadership is like politics. We’re rarely inspired by good leaders but easily fed up with incompetent ones.
If political leadership is OK, then people put up with it and it’s hard for the opposing party to beat them in an election. The incumbent doesn’t have to be great, just OK. On the other hand, if the incumbent is bad, they can easily be beaten.
This gives rise to the adage, elections are lost, they’re not won.
Same thing with products or services you buy. You stick with them if they’re OK and it’s really hard to unseat a supplier with a ‘Great’ competitive product. But you will switch if you start to have problems.
Maybe it’s the same for leaders. You don’t have to be great to get what you want done, you just can’t suck. People disengage from lousy leaders but there isn’t much engagement difference between an OK leader and a great leader.
Should the purpose of all leadership training then be just to make sure leaders don’t suck at it? That’s a much simpler challenge than trying to turn out great leaders.
Perhaps all we really need is leaders that don’t suck.
