Are you or a company you love being BlackBuried?

“Without knowing it, we are coloring everything, putting our spin on it all. ” Jon Kabat-Zinn

Spent a festive holiday colouring and spinning in Mexico, reading a couple of business disaster books: The Big Short, about the 2008 subprime meltdown, and Losing the Signal, about how BlackBerry went from being the product that defined a market to a market share the size of a blackberry. 

As a Canadian, it's particularly sad to contemplate the fall of a once prominent Canadian tech company, but BlackBerry was a disaster that began before it started. It's the kind of disaster that happens every day. It may even be happening to you or a company you love at this very moment.

Allow me to begin to explain with a short story from my holiday. Last Monday night I was minding my own business with my husband in a sports bar watching the Bengals play the Broncos, when an unsteady woman with something shiny resembling saliva encircling her mouth approached my husband, asking him where the restroom was. He pointed her in the direction of the ladies' room and off she tottered, pinballing into a wall as she went. I was alarmed at her condition and awaited her return with some concern.

When she returned she made a beeline to my husband, stuck her face in his face and said, "You're famous aren't you?" I hoped she would guess his identity before vomiting on us, and thankfully she was content to narrow it down to the category of rock star. She departed, asking if I was his daughter, a comment that took some of the glow off my husband's celebrity and added some glow to my evening.

The next night I spied the unsteady woman at the veranda bar, accompanied by her boyfriend, another couple, and an array of blue shooters. Her boyfriend approached me, offered me a blue drink and apologized repeatedly for the previous night. Apparently he had mistaken me for someone who had insulted him in the pool.

He said: "Are you a Pilates instructor?"

My doppelgänger replied: "Are you drunk?"

He took serious offence at being called a drunk (as most drunks do) and set about to get even by sending his girlfriend on a mission to seduce my husband, to steal my man because she could. The woman who had insulted him was also sitting at the bar that night, so he suddenly realized his mistake and tried to make amends. 

Everywhere we went on our holiday we saw him and his girlfriend, except New Year's Day. I thought that perhaps the hotel had placed them under house arrest, but my husband said Mexican hotels can't do things like that. Apparently they just got "a little bit crazy" New Year's Eve and needed some time in their room to recover.

Unlike people, companies rarely recover from their little bits of craziness, and none, even if they tank the economy, ever get placed under house arrest. 

Mike Lazaridis, co-CEO along with Jim Balsillie, of Research in Motion (RIM, now BlackBerry), first saw the iPhone one morning as he watched television on his treadmill. Apparently he had outsourced responsibility for competitive intelligence to The Today Show. Lazaridis didn't need a competitive analysis because his high school shop teacher told him everything he needed to know about BlackBerries:

“The person who puts wireless communications and computers together is really going to build something special.” Mr Micsinszki

Nothing, not even a computer inside a phone with Internet, music, video and thousands of playtoy apps, could sway Mike Lazaridis from seeing the world as wireless communications inside a little black box with a keyboard. Apple had what Gizmodo's Brian Lam called a "Jesus phone". The BlackBerry was all thumbs. By the time RIM acknowledged its mistake--that businesspeople are people too who yearn for beauty and a playful communion with their smartphones, it was too late.

Lazaridis and Balsillie saw the world as they wished it was. They worked hard and moved fast, setting impossible deadline after impossible deadline, never stopping to re-think. RIM didn't have a strategic plan. Google watched Steve Jobs' presentation and started over, scrapping their plans for a phone with a keyboard. RIM, struggling to keep up with demand for the BlackBerry, dug in until carriers demanded a touch screen phone.

RIM responded with the BlackBerry Storm, a rushed attempt to out-Apple Apple. Lazaridis looked at the Storm and saw a superior iPhone. Stephen Fry saw a ShitStorm on the Verizon, and fried the product in a way that only Stephen Fry can: 

“The Storm sucks: I'll go further. The Storm could teach an industrial vacuum pump how to suck. It could teach Linda Lovelace how to suck. It could…you get the idea.”

I get the idea Mr Fry, but wonder why those who imply suck is the very worst thing, are often the same people who think it's the best thing. Ever.

Where was I?

Oh yeah. After the Storm had passed and one million devices were shipped and returned, reshipped and re-returned, RIM faded away, slipping from 50 million smartphones sold in 2011 to less than 20% of that amount four years later. RIM was a hardware company at heart that believed it could compete in a market made of software. 

As another new year begins, let us ask ourselves: is there a way that we are colouring our world, spinning it as we wished it would be rather than as it really is? Are we seeing something or someone that isn't there and acting without pausing to think? Is that new product really a market killer, or the product that will kill your company? Is that woman really the person who insulted you, or did an insult in a pool poke at a problem that you aren't willing to face?

There is only one way to find out, and that is to stop, breathe and listen.

“Just watch this moment, without trying to change it at all. What is happening? What do you feel? What do you see? What do you hear?”
― Jon Kabat-Zinn

About the Author: Lynne Everatt met her doppelgänger Gail, a nice woman coincidentally also from Toronto.