The BlackBerry Problem | The Mistakes Series

Summary

---

Revisionist History: "The Blackberry Problem" | The Mistakes Series

Podcast: Revisionist History
Host: Malcolm Gladwell
Episode: The Blackberry Problem | The Mistakes Series
Release Date: May 14, 2026

---

Episode Overview

In this episode of Revisionist History, Malcolm Gladwell revisits the meteoric rise and sharp fall of BlackBerry, focusing on his college friend and BlackBerry co-CEO Jim Balsillie. This installment is part of the "Mistakes" series, inspired by Michael Linton and Josh Steiner's book, From Mistakes to Meaning. Gladwell explores the nature of intelligence, the burden of being a heretic, and how a strategic vision, no matter how correct, can be doomed by failures in communication and the deep-rooted resistance to radical change within organizations.

---

Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Taxonomy of "Smart"

• Gladwell reflects on the many forms of intelligence and postulates that "every kind of exceptional intelligence has a downside, a price." (01:41)
• He identifies Jim Balsillie as someone with unique cunning—a person who always finds unexpected shortcuts where others see mazes. (07:03)

2. Jim Balsillie's Upbringing and Personality

• Balsillie grew up in small-town Peterborough, Ontario—modest means, public school education, and was always the “smart kid” nobody knew how to handle. (04:41)
• "I don't think they know what to do with you... there's a premium on compliance," Jim notes, discussing how school was "just incredibly boring." (04:50)
• As a child, he was taken to a psychologist, a rarity for his era and background. (06:22)
• His relentless work ethic, sewing his own clothes and holding multiple paper routes, shaped his drive and outsider mentality. (22:21)

3. The Rise of BlackBerry (RIM)

• After Harvard Business School, Balsillie joined Research in Motion (RIM) and rapidly grew it into a multibillion-dollar company, riding the initial smartphone boom. (23:27)
• "When they launched [the iPhone] in 2007 we were $3 billion sales. The next year we grew to $6. 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… the fastest growing company in the world." (24:08)

4. The Crucial Mistake: The Boardroom Fork in the Road

• In 2011, BlackBerry faced existential pressure from Apple's iPhone and Google's Android.
• The company’s profit center was its services (BBM—BlackBerry Messenger), not hardware. At the time, "we had more profit our services business then Facebook had total revenue at that time." (11:09)
• Jim envisioned pivoting RIM to focus exclusively on BBM (essentially what WhatsApp and other social platforms would become), embedding it in cellular plans rather than relying on ad models. (12:51, 15:05)

The Missed Opportunity

• At its peak, BBM had 80 million users in 2011—more than WhatsApp at the time. (15:57)
• Balsillie posits that the probability of BBM becoming a dominant force in telecommunications, had they executed his plan, was "100%." (16:16)
  • "Well, it, the probability that it would have stayed a major force is 100%." (16:16)
• The board, however, rejected this radical pivot, choosing instead to double down on hardware—against Jim's advice. (17:18)
• "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." (08:47)

Boardroom Dynamics and Jim's Self-Awareness

• Jim admits he underestimated the difficulty of persuading the board: "I’d not spent near enough time with them explaining it and debating it... I'd always driven the decisions… But ultimately, the board held the power." (17:21, 26:14)
• "What you overestimated was that you thought that having a great idea… would be sufficient to win over a group of intelligent people… they need to have… you need to go to dinner with them seven times... It was all that soft stuff that you underestimated." (27:28, Gladwell's analysis)
• Jim reflects, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah. No, I. 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.'" (28:40)

5. The Hockey Franchise Analogy

• Gladwell compares Balsillie's failed attempt to buy and move multiple NHL teams to Hamilton to the BlackBerry situation: a correct insight, but an inability to win over the key decision-makers. (29:46)
• "In both instances, you cannot convince the board, in one case the rest of the owners... in the other case the board of the company, you cannot convince them of the 100% accuracy of your position." (30:28)
• Jim insists, "One was just never meant to be… They weren’t going to allow it to happen.” (30:44)

6. The Heretic and the Cloth Mother

• Gladwell frames Jim as a "heretic"—comfortable taking radical positions regardless of social cost. (32:50)
• He closes with an evocative metaphor from a 1950s psychology study: "At the end of the day, I think the rim board wanted a cloth mother and Jim was wire mother... 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." (32:50)

---

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Gladwell on Balsillie’s intelligence:
  “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…” (07:03-07:21)

• Jim on his defining error:
  “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, and you get blindsided.” (03:04-03:24)

• On the BBM pivot:
  “I'd spent a year and a half buying companies to avail a service, to make it an open service... what we know of as social media right now. And there was a small emerging player called WhatsApp… we had multiple of users as they did… I thought the board was on side, I thought everyone was on side.” (12:31-13:25)

• Gladwell’s summary of Jim’s blind spot:
  “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… [but] they need more than an intellectual argument to win them over.” (27:28-28:40)

• Jim’s self-reflection:
  “I always drove the decisions. And they’d always been, ‘yes, of course, we’ll do what I’m pushing.’ But ultimately, the board held the power.” (26:14-27:02)

• The Heretic vs. Orthodoxy:
  “The heretic is the person who strays from the orthodoxy, but not quietly or passively… 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.” (32:50)

• The clinching metaphor:
  “At the end of the day, I think the rimboard wanted a cloth mother and Jim was wire mother. 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.” (32:50)

---

Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:41] – Gladwell’s reflections on the varieties and costs of intelligence
• [03:04] – Jim Balsillie describes his foundational mistake: assuming people were aligned with him
• [04:41-07:03] – Balsillie's early childhood, rebellious intelligence, and early signs of alienation
• [11:09-15:59] – The 2011 BlackBerry fork: BBM's potential and the hardware/services split
• [16:16] – Balsillie states the chance BBM could have dominated: “100%”
• [17:21-18:06] – Boardroom dissent and Balsillie's resignation
• [22:21] – Balsillie expresses deeply ingrained work ethic and outsider status
• [23:27-24:25] – The explosive rise of RIM/BlackBerry
• [25:43-28:40] – Gladwell and Balsillie debate the importance of “soft” persuasion and board politics over being simply “right”
• [29:46-30:44] – The hockey franchise analogy: correct insight versus political/social reality
• [32:50] – Gladwell’s closing metaphor of the heretic (wire mother) and the board (cloth mother)

---

Tone & Style

Gladwell’s narrative is reflective, personal, and philosophical—with touches of affection for his subject and his trademark penchant for drawing large lessons from small moments. The interplay between Gladwell and Balsillie is candid and at times tinged with regret, as they confront the sometimes tragic consequences of being right at the wrong time—or in the wrong way.

---

Summary Takeaways

• The fate of BlackBerry hinged less on technology and more on strategic vision, persuasion, and human dynamics.
• Balsillie’s greatest error was underestimating the necessity of winning emotional, political, and “soft” support for radical pivots—even when the case seems intellectually unassailable.
• Gladwell frames Balsillie not as a tragic hero but as a classic heretic: brilliant, right, and ultimately undone by his differences in approach and temperament.
• The episode is as much about organizational behavior and the cost of nonconformity as it is about technology—a cautionary tale for would-be visionaries.

---

Transcript

[VRBO Announcer]

This summer, don't squeeze in. Spread out. Find homes big enough for your whole guest list on vrbo. From family reunions to trips with friends, VRBO has spacious summer stays for every group size and budget. That's vacation rentals done right. Start exploring on VRBO and book your next day now.

[Lowe's Announcer]

During Memorial Day at Lowe's Shop Household must haves for less save $80 on a char broil performance series 4 burner grill to chef up something special plus get up to 45% off select major appliances to keep things fresh. Our best lineup is here at Lowe's. Lowe's we help you save valid through 527, while supplies last selection varies by location. See lowe's.com for details.

[Interviewer]

Visit your nearby Lowe's.

[Home Depot Announcer]

Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next Grill 4 burner gas grill on special. Buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton bay West Grill 7 piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day, get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot while supplies Last price invalid May 14 through May 27 US only exclusion supplies. See homedepot.com Pricematch for details.

[Interviewer]

Pushkin.

[Malcolm 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. I feel I spent my adolescence cataloguing 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 back room in his brain was a giant computer that just quietly hummed along, solving one problem after another. Oh, then I had a friend who'd a mind that she'd attached 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 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 role, I think of my old college friend Jim Balsley.

[Jim Balsillie]

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, and you get blindsided.

[Malcolm 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. What was it like for you growing up? You went to. You grew up in Peterborough?

[Jim Balsillie]

Yes, I did.

[Interviewer]

And you went to public high school in Peterborough?

[Jim Balsillie]

Yes.

[Malcolm 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.

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Interviewer]

Your high school, I suspect, was a

[Malcolm Gladwell]

lot like my high school.

[Interviewer]

We're not talking about Exeter. No.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Although I actually. I don't mean to diss it, because

[Interviewer]

I got an amazing education from fabulous teachers. So what was it like to be.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You were the smart kid in high school?

[Jim Balsillie]

Yes.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What was that like?

[Jim Balsillie]

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 and 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.

[Interviewer]

Are you talking about yourself?

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Interviewer]

You get in trouble in high school?

[Jim Balsillie]

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. He said, where did I go wrong? And from the back of the class, I said, when you were born, and. And Malcolm, I don't. 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. And then a couple 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 came first in grade seven and eights in Ontario.

[Malcolm 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?

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Interviewer]

What were you doing it for that

[Malcolm Gladwell]

led your parents to take you to a child psychologist?

[Jim Balsillie]

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? It was, it was a very different era. Very different era.

[Malcolm 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 when 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 had won the trophy, gone home, changed and was having a beer. This is Canada, remember? 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, but 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?

[Interviewer]

In the business school case studies about

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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. 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.

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Hey everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this your first date?

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Anyways, get a [e-mail] or with your local agent.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Liberty, Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.

[Mood.com Announcer]

Let's be honest. Buying cannabis shouldn't be complicated, sketchy or low quality. That's why I want to tell you about mood.com. that's m o o d dot com. Mood ships federally legal cannabis straight to your door. No medical card, no hassle. And here's the the quality is better than anything you'll find at your local dispensary. Yeah, I said it. Whether you're into edibles, concentrates, flour, or just looking to explore, you'll find it all at Mood. And it's not just the variety that makes them stand out. Every product is sourced from small American owned family farms that care deeply about what they grow. It's cannabis you can trust. Delivered discreetly and ready to elevate your mood. And because you're a listener, you get 20% off your first order. Just head to mood.com that's M-O-Ood.com to get started.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

So tell me, what do you mean

[Interviewer]

by you wanted to go left and

[Malcolm Gladwell]

they wanted to go right?

[Interviewer]

And we're talking about what? First of all, let's date this.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

What era are we talking about?

[Jim Balsillie]

We're talking 2011. And a couple 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, that year, 2011, we had more profit our services business then Facebook had total revenue at that time.

[Interviewer]

We're going to talk about BlackBerry. The beleaguered smartphone maker, BlackBerry CEO himself has admitted one of the reasons they're struggling is because they didn't innovate fast enough. Let me give you my 2012 prediction with the company that brings us to BlackBerry. I'm predicting that they are going to be on the verge of bankruptcy.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There were two sides to BlackBerry in those years. There was the phone, that rectangular plastic block with the 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.

[Jim Balsillie]

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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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

[Jim Balsillie]

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 multiple of users as they did. And so yeah, I beavered away on it and I thought the board was on side, I thought everyone was on side.

[Malcolm 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.

[Interviewer]

And I want to make sure everyone understands what we're talking about here. So in 2011, many of us still have a BlackBerry 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.

[Jim Balsillie]

Correct.

[Interviewer]

Yeah. That would be the equivalent of what WhatsApp became.

[Jim Balsillie]

Is that the mess model, 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.

[Interviewer]

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

[Jim Balsillie]

That's correct, yeah. 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 my, and you remember, you, you had digital, you know, voiceover IP happening on those things at that time you had pictures, you could, you could store them, you establish 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.

[Interviewer]

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

[Jim Balsillie]

80 million.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

80 million.

[Interviewer]

So you, what would you put the probability 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, how big do you think you could have grown it?

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Malcolm 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.

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Interviewer]

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

[Jim Balsillie]

Well, that 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, and really I was just speaking into, just a vacuum of, of receptivity and interest to it.

[Interviewer]

Why weren't they with you?

[Jim Balsillie]

I think it was too radical what I was trying to do. I, I, I'd 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 think they'll just follow you.

[Malcolm 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, I wasn't consulted.

[Jim Balsillie]

I didn't know it was happening. It was just on the agenda, presented and decided. And. 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. I resigned from the board and sold my shares, the remaining shares at that time. And, 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 when it's such a consequential decision?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

We'll be right back. 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 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. 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 sense 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

[Interviewer]

when you came to college, to university? What's your account of your kind of first year at Trinity?

[Jim Balsillie]

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. I mean, I was smart. But then you'd see Robertson Davies at high table and sometimes his friend Northrop Fry there, and it's like, dorothy, this is not Kansas anymore.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Just so you know, Robertson Davies and Northrop Fry 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.

[Interviewer]

So we just to remember you and I in, you were across the hall in our second year. And I remember there were. How many people were on our floor? 13 people on our floor or something like that. I remember telling my dad, max, max, 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, what was your kind of cycle?

[Jim Balsillie]

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, 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, 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, I get, I just enjoy sewing and, and, but I always sewed. I had my own clothes. I, I stitched in my shirts. I, I, I darned socks. Yeah, it's funny thing, right? And when something rips, I'll, I'll, and my wife says, why don't you buy a new pair of sweatpants? I said, well, I can fix those. And it's very funny. So I'll sit there with a big thing and yeah. Do a catch stitch on it and yeah. And then, 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.

[Malcolm 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.

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Malcolm Gladwell]

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

[Jim Balsillie]

So when they they launched in 2007 we were 3 billion sales. The next year we grew to 6. The next year we grew to 11 billion. The next year we grew to 15. The next year year we grew to 20 billion. Fortune had us in the middle of that time, the fastest growing company in the world.

[Liberty Mutual Announcer]

Smarter and sleeker now with real time, turn by turn, GPS navigation. It has the intelligence you require with the beauty you desire.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

The all new BlackBerry curve. 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.

[Interviewer]

But Jim Bay, this is a good moment for a reflection here. How are they not with you? You've built this thing, you've been the strategic force behind this extraordinary company. The device is in the hands of the President of the United States. I mean 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.

[Jim Balsillie]

Yeah, well Mike and the new CEO Thorsten didn't, they were hardware people.

[Interviewer]

And

[Jim Balsillie]

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 was like I told him his dog just got hit by a car.

[Interviewer]

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

[Jim Balsillie]

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, is hard for people. They, you'd much rather have a continuum. Yeah. And more time for sure. More, more preparation, more persuasion. I, I, I did not spend the time I needed to. I, 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. So. Underestimated their power, underestimated how they were sold in their way of thinking.

[Interviewer]

If we cut to the bottom line here is you.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

You have a.

[Interviewer]

A notion of where the company's future lies, which turns out, in retrospect, to be accurate. Right. Yours was the only path.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

There was no path.

[Interviewer]

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.

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Interviewer]

Yeah, 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. They need to have. You need to go 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 big time. What you needed was what you needed to be. You thought what. What was. What was most important was to be. Right?

[Jim Balsillie]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And yeah. No, I. 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.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

By the way, what's Jim doing as all 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 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.

[Interviewer]

I'm wondering, isn't the Penguin story a version of this?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

That.

[Interviewer]

That was another case where you were right. The Penguin should not be in Pittsburgh. The Penguins should be in hamilton. Right. You are 100 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 a hundred times better as a home for the Penguins than Pittsburgh. Right. So in both instances, the story of BlackBerry's fork in the road and the

[Malcolm Gladwell]

story of the Penguins, you are correct.

[Interviewer]

And in both instances you cannot convince the board, in one case the rest

[Malcolm Gladwell]

of the owners and the other case

[Interviewer]

the board of the company, they. You cannot convince them of the 100% accuracy of your position. Had you done.

[Jim Balsillie]

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.

[Malcolm 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.

[Interviewer]

Let me, let me, let me, let me just. I just want to. One last point about Pittsburgh, the Penguins.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

I'm going to imagine a completely different Jim.

[Interviewer]

Imagine if you are the schmoozer of schmoozers. You are the most kind of gregarious back slapping. You're everyone. You know, you're like this beloved social blah, blah. You spend and you had wined and dined and got to know every single

[Malcolm Gladwell]

owner in the, in the NHL.

[Interviewer]

And then you had said to them, you buy the Penguins.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

And then you say to them, guys, this is a bad hockey market.

[Interviewer]

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

[Malcolm Gladwell]

do it that way?

[Jim Balsillie]

If you're that person, in hindsight, I don't think I see no chance.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Oh, come on. Really? Oh, come on, Jim. This is your mistake. This is your blind spot.

[Interviewer]

Doesn't this drive you?

[Malcolm Gladwell]

Why.

[Interviewer]

Why am I the Only one who's driven crazy by this. They're morons.

[Malcolm Gladwell]

They're morons.

[Jim Balsillie]

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.

[Interviewer]

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

[Jim Balsillie]

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

[Malcolm 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. 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. 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 DM 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 DM 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. 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 did they choose? Cloth mother. They went for short term comfort over long term survival. At the end of the day, I think the rimboard wanted a cloth mother and Jim was wire mother. 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. Revisionist History is produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, Lucy Sullivan and Ben Nadaff Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Shakurji. Fact checking by Angeli Mercado. Our executive producer is Jacob Smith. Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence. Original music by Luis Guerra. Sound design and mastering by Marcelo d'. Oliveira. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.