A dean at the University of Toronto who serves on the board of Research in Motion scoffed at the notion that the company should be more like Apple, which has been metaphorically blowing the BlackBerry maker to smithereens.
In a wide-ranging interview with Canada's newspaper, the Globe and Mail, Roger Martin noted that Apple dismissed its co-founder, the late Steve Jobs, in favor of an outside marketing specialist before Jobs returned to the company.
“They ask ‘Why can’t you be more like Apple?’ So we should go bankrupt and fire our founders and bring in a moron? That’s what we should do?" Martin, the dean and professor of strategic management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, told the newspaper.
However, Martin and his fellow board members would be brain-dead if they didn't envy Apple's sales, which have been far exceeding shipments of BlackBerry phones and tablet computers. In its quarter ending Dec. 31, Apple sold 37.04 million iPhones and 15.43 million iPads. RIM's most recent earnings ending Nov. 26 exclude the busy holiday season; still, it's sales didn't come close to Apple as RIM reported shipments of 14.1 million BlackBerry smartphones and 150,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets.
The Harvard University-educated Martin also responded to criticism from some analysts and investors that the board should have moved earlier to replace the co-CEOs of the company, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, with an outsider. In January, RIM named one of its former chief operating officers, Thorsten Heins, to lead the company following a year of turmoil.
"So we're supposed to hand it over to children, or morons from the outside who will destroy the company," the 55-year-old Martin, who became a RIM director in 2007, said in the Globe and Mail interview. "Or should we try to build out way to having succession."
Martin said that it wasn't until the late fall that Heins emerged as the next leader of RIM, and Balsillie and Lazaridis were responsible for the internal transition.
Analysts have welcomed the leadership change, but they assert questions still linger over the future strategies of a company whose stock price is just a shell of its former self.
More certain is that one of RIM's former leaders can sleep better these days: Balsillie told Martin the day after he resigned that he had his first good night's sleep in 20 years.
