New RIM book set for launch

What really goes on in Waterloo, Canada’s technology capital and home to Research in Motion (RIM:TSX)?

On March 2nd, after several years of work, we’ll all know a bunch more about Canada’s most important technology company and the people behind it. That’s the date for the release of the new book Blackberry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion by Rod McQueen. And as much as I’d love to reward our loyal readers with some inside skinny, I have to admit that I have none to share. The chinese walls between my authour/father and I have been very robust over the decades, allowing each of us to ply our different trades in remarkably close proximity to each other (he happened to write about politics from Washington, D.C. when I worked for former PM Brian Mulroney, and then about Bay Street when I started out at BMO almost 20 years ago).

What I can report is that whatever is in the book, it was sufficiently interesting to attract publishers in the United Kingdom, India and China, to go along with a U.S. launch on April 1st (although Amazon is already taking orders for March 2nd release, and has already applied the 30% “best seller” discount). The other thing I can tip you off to is to the fact that RIM Co-CEOs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis spent countless hours being interviewed for the book – the first time they’ve ever sat down to tell their detailed corporate life story. They also wrote the book’s foreward.

Here’s some stuff the authour is sharing on his blog:

Even after spending a quarter of a century building Research In Motion, Mike Lazaridis remains deeply passionate about what he’s doing. “Mike is still a little-boy gadget freak. Whenever I see him at a trade show, he takes me aside, pulls out the latest toy, and he oohs and he aahs all over it,” says California-based wireless consultant Andy Seybold. “Mike is not driven by money. He is driven by ‘What can I do next to take this platform and turn it into something super cool yet again?’ And he keeps doing it.”

Co-CEO Jim Balsillie equates their roles at RIM in a roiling, competitive world with the wild ride of surfers. “It’s like a beach which has got three or four series of waves. You have the rolling waves here, but then you sort of have a semi, loosely coupled set of rolling waves over here, and you have a set here, and they’re all one body of interrelationships, and wave by wave by wave, you have to understand that they’re separate but not. Between Mike and I they’re highly, highly interrelated. You’re surfing these waves but you are not in control, you are definitely not in control. You just aim and hold on and tweak where you can.”

For all of the teeth gnashing about the lack of start-up capital, the fickleness of investors, and the dearth of repeat entrepreneurs in Canada, it can be done. If there ever is a story that should serve as encouragement to every Canadian entrepreneur, and their Angel and VC partners, the RIM tale is it.

MRM
(disclosure – I own RIM)