Speaker 1: Pushkin.
Speaker 2: It dawns on all of us at some point before
Speaker 2: adolescence that there is something called smart, and it is
Speaker 2: really rare. Only a small number of people are smart.
Speaker 2: And then a few years later you have an even
Speaker 2: more important realization, which is that smart comes in many
Speaker 2: different varieties. I feel I spent my adolescence cataloging all
Speaker 2: the varieties of smart. There was my high school friend
Speaker 2: who had a mind that was a giant sponge that
Speaker 2: could soak up what seemed like an infinite amount of knowledge.
Speaker 2: Then I got to college, I met a guy who's
Speaker 2: thinking seemed effortless. He could be distracted or procrastinating, or
Speaker 2: dancing at a party, it didn't matter. Somewhere in a
Speaker 2: back room in his brain was a giant computer that
Speaker 2: just quietly hummed along, solving one problem after another. Oh
Speaker 2: then I had a friend who to mind that she'd
Speaker 2: attached to a giant V eight with like eight hundred horsepower.
Speaker 2: I'd never seen smart attached to energy like that before.
Speaker 2: I spent a lot of time in college working on
Speaker 2: my taxonomy of smart, and along the way I had
Speaker 2: a third realization that every kind of exceptional intelligence has
Speaker 2: a downside, a price that person had to pay for
Speaker 2: being one of the chosen few. And every time I
Speaker 2: think of that third role, I think of my old
Speaker 2: college friend Jim Balsley.
Speaker 1: My mistake in naivety was to think that people were
Speaker 1: with me. So you're flying around the world, You're trying
Speaker 1: to get people on side, and you think they're on side,
Speaker 1: but they're not, and you get blindsided.
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to Revisionist History,
Speaker 2: my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. This episode is
Speaker 2: the fourth in our series on mistakes, inspired by Michael
Speaker 2: Linton and Josh Steiner's book From Mistakes to Meaning, And
Speaker 2: this story is about the big mistake, the change the
Speaker 2: life of my old college friend Jim, who I will say,
Speaker 2: without reservation, is possessed of one of the most remarkable
Speaker 2: minds I have ever met, and paid a price for it.
Speaker 2: What was it like for you growing up? You grew
Speaker 2: up in Peterborough, Yes, I did. And you went to
Speaker 2: public high school in Peterborough.
Speaker 1: Yes.
Speaker 2: Peterborough, For those unfamiliar with southern Ontario is just over
Speaker 2: an hour east and north of Toronto. It is to
Speaker 2: Toronto roughly. What I don't know Poughkeepsie is to New
Speaker 2: York City.
Speaker 1: My dad was a tradesman, My mom was a homemaker.
Speaker 2: Your high school, I suspect was a lot like my
Speaker 2: high school. We're not talking about Exeter No, although actually
Speaker 2: I don't mean to diss it, because I got an
Speaker 2: amazing education from fabulous teachers. So what was it like
Speaker 2: to be you were the smart kid in high school?
Speaker 1: Yes?
Speaker 2: What was that like?
Speaker 1: I don't think they know what to do with you,
Speaker 1: So I think you're just I think there's a premium
Speaker 1: on compliance. I think we've learned now that high energy
Speaker 1: kids need to run around and when they're young, until
Speaker 1: they're tired. But kind of making them sitting at a
Speaker 1: desk all day is when they're young, it's really really difficult.
Speaker 1: Are you talking about yourself? Yes, very much so. And
Speaker 1: it was just incredibly boring and you just look at
Speaker 1: the clock and count minutes and.
Speaker 2: Yeah, did you get in trouble in high school?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Yeah, a few times. One time, when I was
Speaker 1: in grade seven, a teacher did a long formula across
Speaker 1: three or four boards and he said, where did I
Speaker 1: go wrong? And from the back of the class, I said,
Speaker 1: when you were born? And Malcolm and he took me
Speaker 1: out of the class and he held me up by
Speaker 1: the scruff of the neck and I was my fever
Speaker 1: off the ground against a locker, and he had me
Speaker 1: taken out of the math class. And I was just
Speaker 1: it seemed funny at the time. And then and then
Speaker 1: a couple months later there was there was a provincial
Speaker 1: math contest for you know, the ten million people in Ontario,
Speaker 1: and as a grade seven I came first in grade
Speaker 1: seven and eighths in Ontario.
Speaker 2: He was the best math student in the entire province,
Speaker 2: but he wasn't allowed in his own math class. What
Speaker 2: did your parents make of you?
Speaker 1: When I was four years old, they took me to
Speaker 1: some child psychologist, which was they didn't know what to do.
Speaker 2: What were you doing for that led your parents to
Speaker 2: take you to a child psychologist?
Speaker 1: I don't know, I don't know. We're we're kind of
Speaker 1: Presbyterian southern Ontario, so you don't really talk a lot,
Speaker 1: you don't sort of you just sort of carry on
Speaker 1: and so you don't it's not like this rich unpacking
Speaker 1: of psychologists kids or something like that. Everybody's just, you know,
Speaker 1: it's kind of go play outside and you know, try
Speaker 1: try to make it home for a dinner kind of thing. Right.
Speaker 1: It was a very different era, very different era.
Speaker 2: In my taxonomy of smart, Jim has a whole category
Speaker 2: to himself. I don't mean this in a derogatory way,
Speaker 2: but Jim has cunning. My brain I was beginning to
Speaker 2: understand at that time likes to take the long way home.
Speaker 2: Jim only took shortcuts if life was amazed. Most of
Speaker 2: us stumble along, retracing our steps from one dead end
Speaker 2: to another dead end until we finally get to the
Speaker 2: other side. Jim would see the right path instantly, or
Speaker 2: more accurately. He would recognize that there's actually a gap
Speaker 2: in the hedge right at the start, which no one
Speaker 2: had ever noticed before, with a straight shot to the finish,
Speaker 2: and he'd just cut through there. And by the time
Speaker 2: the rest of us stumbled to the end, he had
Speaker 2: won the trophy, gone home, changed, and was having a beer.
Speaker 2: This is Canada, remember. Not long after college, Jim met
Speaker 2: an engineer named Mike Lazaritas who had a little company
Speaker 2: called Research in Motion RIM, as it was known. Jim
Speaker 2: becomes co CEO, and to the surprise of absolutely no
Speaker 2: one who knew him, builds RIM into a multi billion
Speaker 2: dollar juggernaut. Remember fifteen years ago when everyone had a BlackBerry,
Speaker 2: first real smartphone with those clickety clackety buttons. That was Jim,
Speaker 2: So why don't you use a BlackBerry anymore? In the
Speaker 2: business school case studies about the fall of BlackBerry, there
Speaker 2: are pages and pages on the rapidly shifting smartphone landscape
Speaker 2: of the early oughts, miscalculations, the cloud of Apple, all
Speaker 2: the things that business goal case studies like to dwell on.
Speaker 2: But I think there's a simpler explanation. I think you
Speaker 2: need to understand something about my old friend Jim set
Speaker 2: the stage for me.
Speaker 1: Sure, it's interesting because when you talk about mistakes, and
Speaker 1: I do think the biggest mistake in my career when
Speaker 1: I look back with Rim, we had a fork in
Speaker 1: the road and I mismanaged the board relationship at a
Speaker 1: time where I wanted to go left and they decided
Speaker 1: to go right. And that not only changed the trajectory
Speaker 1: of the company, it changed the trajectory of the global
Speaker 1: technology industry.
Speaker 2: So tell me what do you mean by you wanted
Speaker 2: to go left and they wanted to go right? And
Speaker 2: what we're talking about?
Speaker 1: What?
Speaker 2: First of all, let's date this what ear are we
Speaker 2: talking about.
Speaker 1: We're talking twenty eleven, and a couple things were going on.
Speaker 1: One our hardware business had grown a lot, but it
Speaker 1: was under pressure, huge pressure, and there were new operating systems,
Speaker 1: one from Apple and one from Google. They were putting
Speaker 1: tremendous pressure on our hardware sales. But our services business
Speaker 1: was where we made all our money, our messaging services.
Speaker 1: So that year twenty eleven, we had more profit from
Speaker 1: our services business than Facebook had total revenue at that time.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk about BlackBerry, the belaguered smartphonemaker.
Speaker 2: BlackBerry CEO himself has admitted one of the reasons they're
Speaker 2: struggling is because they didn't innovate fast enough.
Speaker 1: I mean, givening like two do twelve prediction with the
Speaker 1: company that brings us the BlackBerry, and predicting that they
Speaker 1: were going to be on the bridge of bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: There were two sides to BlackBerry in those years. There
Speaker 2: was the phone that rectangular plastic block with the physical keyboard,
Speaker 2: and there was also a messaging function BlackBerry Messenger BBM.
Speaker 2: That was what Jim is calling this service business. Hardware
Speaker 2: and services were separate, and Jim thought that BlackBerry should
Speaker 2: get out of the physical phone business, which wasn't making
Speaker 2: any money anymore, and just be in the BlackBerry Messenger business.
Speaker 1: And so I'd spent a year and a half buying
Speaker 1: companies to avail a service, to make it an open service,
Speaker 1: and I'd spent time with the carriers, and they were
Speaker 1: going to launch it with SMS, call it SMS two
Speaker 1: dot zero, and it had storage and rich media phone.
Speaker 2: What he was imagining was turning BlackBerry Messenger into the
Speaker 2: backbone of the entire smartphone ecosystem.
Speaker 1: So it's effectively what we know of as social media
Speaker 1: right now. And there was a small emerging player called
Speaker 1: WhatsApp that worked cross platform, but we had a multiple
Speaker 1: of users as they did. And so yeah, I'd beavered
Speaker 1: away on it. And I thought the board was on side.
Speaker 1: I thought everyone was on side.
Speaker 2: Apple had just come out with the first iPhones. Jim
Speaker 2: was thinking that there was no way little BlackBerry, as
Speaker 2: fast as it was growing, could compete with Apple or
Speaker 2: giants like Samsung. But BlackBerry Messenger was a different matter.
Speaker 2: BlackBerry was dominant in that space and in the version
Speaker 2: of the world Jim imagined your texting and social media
Speaker 2: would come bundled with your wireless contract. So the minute
Speaker 2: you hooked up your new iPhone or Samsung phone to
Speaker 2: a wireless provider, you'd be using BBM. Stop there, and
Speaker 2: let's go back, and I want to make sure everyone
Speaker 2: understands what we're talking about here. So it's in twenty eleven.
Speaker 2: Many of us still have a BlackBerry, and there's two
Speaker 2: components here. There is the physical phone and there's also
Speaker 2: you're talking about a service that could live, a messaging
Speaker 2: service that could either live on a BlackBerry or live anywhere. Correct, Yeah,
Speaker 2: that would be the equivalent of WhatsApp became.
Speaker 1: Is that the math model Facebook and WhatsApp became. That's correct.
Speaker 1: What at the time was BBM effectively what social media.
Speaker 1: And the difference would be is it would be in
Speaker 1: your subscription plan as part of your texting rather than
Speaker 1: an ad supported social media service. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So that the goal here or the play was to
Speaker 2: make the BlackBerry services business the backbone of basically new media,
Speaker 2: of new social.
Speaker 1: Media, that's correct, and it would be embedded in your cell,
Speaker 1: your plan. And I worked with the carriers, the major
Speaker 1: CEOs throughout Europe and already had two of the big
Speaker 1: three committed in US. So all you need is enough
Speaker 1: to keep it going and it eventually tips. So yeah,
Speaker 1: people would have said, I'm migrating to an android. I'
Speaker 1: might degrading to an iOS. I'll just take my BBM
Speaker 1: with me. I'll maintain all my contacts, all my and
Speaker 1: you remember you had digital voiceover IP happening on those
Speaker 1: things at that time. You had pictures, you could store them,
Speaker 1: you established groups, you had status of delivery. All the
Speaker 1: things that were social media that was emerging at that time.
Speaker 1: We had that in the BBM.
Speaker 2: Well, how many users BBM users did you have at
Speaker 2: the beginning of twenty twelve, say, or the beginning of
Speaker 2: twenty eleven, eighty million?
Speaker 1: Eighty million.
Speaker 2: So you what would you put the probability of of
Speaker 2: BBM becoming the dominant becoming this kind of dominant player
Speaker 2: in the in the telecommunications world if you had gone
Speaker 2: that route, do you think you could have how big
Speaker 2: do you think you could have grown it?
Speaker 1: Well, it's the probability that it would have stayed a
Speaker 1: major force is one hundred percent.
Speaker 2: That's the vision, he pitches to the board. We're trapped
Speaker 2: in the maze along with everyone else. Here's the shortcut.
Speaker 1: Was he right?
Speaker 2: Of course he was. Jim's always right.
Speaker 1: So yeah, in the immortal words of the Yoki Barrow,
Speaker 1: when you reach the fork in the road, you got
Speaker 1: to take it.
Speaker 2: So you go tell me about the board meeting. You
Speaker 2: go to the board, You go to the board, and
Speaker 2: what happens.
Speaker 1: Well, they we'd had the board, had brought in consultants,
Speaker 1: and I was explaining this and presenting this and talking
Speaker 1: about the strategy, thinking they were with me, and really
Speaker 1: I was just speaking into just a vacuum of perceptivity
Speaker 1: and interest to it.
Speaker 2: Why weren't they with you?
Speaker 1: I think it was too radical what I was trying
Speaker 1: to do. I'd not spent near enough time with them
Speaker 1: explaining it and debating it, which is a lesson I learned.
Speaker 1: And you've really driven the company strategies for twenty years
Speaker 1: to a twenty billion dollar company, and you think they'll
Speaker 1: just follow you.
Speaker 2: They say, what are you talking about? We're a company
Speaker 2: that makes phones. An SMS two point zero. Jim's vision
Speaker 2: for the next stage of BlackBerry is killed just a
Speaker 2: few weeks before it was supposed to launch.
Speaker 1: I wasn't consulted. I didn't know it was happening. It
Speaker 1: was just on the agenda, presented and decided and I
Speaker 1: called the lead director after that and I said, what
Speaker 1: what's going on here? This will kill the company? And
Speaker 1: they say, the decisions made and so I resigned from
Speaker 1: the board and sold my shares. The remaining shares at
Speaker 1: that time, and they were extremely confident for a year
Speaker 1: and a half, marketing campaigns, super Bowl ads, lots of
Speaker 1: declarations of its future and its success and it's going
Speaker 1: to be great. And there was just one board member
Speaker 1: who was from the tech industry and from the telecom
Speaker 1: industry who called me and said, there's nothing I can
Speaker 1: do to stop it. This is Mattess. Yeah, And it
Speaker 1: was just jaw on the floor. I just never experienced
Speaker 1: anything like that, and I didn't see it coming. And
Speaker 1: how could somebody be so blind to something like that
Speaker 1: when it's such a consequential decision. We'll be right back.
Speaker 2: Jim and I both went to Trinity College at the
Speaker 2: University of Toronto, which was and still is the smallest
Speaker 2: and the snobbiest of the colleges that make up the
Speaker 2: University of Toronto. I met Jim in the first few
Speaker 2: weeks of freshman year. I had just turned seventeen. I
Speaker 2: just had eye surgery. So I had a huge scarveting
Speaker 2: down the side of my face, a massive afro, lots
Speaker 2: of acne, maybe one hundred and ten pounds, and all
Speaker 2: the wrong clothes. I was from a small town way
Speaker 2: off in the countryside. Here I was at swanky Trinity,
Speaker 2: and I had no idea how the fancy kids dressed
Speaker 2: and no money to do anything about it. I had
Speaker 2: a moment of truth, I need to figure out how
Speaker 2: to fit in. Jim lived across the hall from me.
Speaker 2: He taught me how to play backgammon. I played endless
Speaker 2: games at touch football with him. I had a beloved
Speaker 2: jade tree that I called William F. Buckley, and he
Speaker 2: used to steal Buckley from my room and put him
Speaker 2: in some perilous place. And I think the reason that
Speaker 2: I felt a certain affinity with Jim is that I
Speaker 2: since he shared my urgency about fitting in, only it
Speaker 2: was going to be much harder for him than me.
Speaker 2: First of all, he was from Peterborough. Nobody was from Peterborough.
Speaker 2: He had further to climb. And second, he was really
Speaker 2: really ambitious. I mean I was ambitious, but not like Jim.
Speaker 2: Jim wanted it more. Do you remember what was it
Speaker 2: like when you came to university. What's your account of
Speaker 2: your kind of first year at Trinity.
Speaker 1: Ah, well, it was very intimidating. I found these people
Speaker 1: from tremendous privilege and just very very intimidating and meeting
Speaker 1: people with stellar backgrounds. I'd never been on an airplane,
Speaker 1: I've never been outside of Ontario. Very modest background. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just tremendously intimidating. I mean, I was smart, but then
Speaker 1: you'd see Robertson Davies at high table and sometimes his
Speaker 1: friend north of Fry there and it's like, con Dorothy,
Speaker 1: this is not Kansas anymore.
Speaker 2: Just so you know, Robertson Davies and north of Fry
Speaker 2: were two of the biggest Canadian intellectual celebrities of that era,
Speaker 2: and we'd see them out our window walking through the
Speaker 2: college quadrangle God out for a stroll. For those of
Speaker 2: us from the sticks, this seemed unbelievable. So we just
Speaker 2: to remember you and I in You were across the
Speaker 2: hall in our second year, and I remember there were
Speaker 2: how many people were our floor? Thirteen people on our
Speaker 2: floor or something like that. I remember telling my dad,
Speaker 2: I Max Max Max maybe twelve. It was like private
Speaker 2: school kids and kids who went up for Canada College,
Speaker 2: you know, and kids who went to it was Did
Speaker 2: you feel like you had to work harder to prove
Speaker 2: yourself in that world? What was yours?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Well, I worked all the time as a kid.
Speaker 1: I had five or six paper roots, four or five
Speaker 1: paper roots almost all the time. And then I got
Speaker 1: summer and winter jobs from grade and seven on. I
Speaker 1: bought my own clothes. I still to this day have
Speaker 1: my own pants and darn socks. Yeah, I can darn
Speaker 1: socks with the best of them. I sew my own
Speaker 1: buttons on because you learn how to do it. And
Speaker 1: I'll sit there, watch the news and sew up my
Speaker 1: clothes all the time. It's very, very funny. I just
Speaker 1: enjoy sewing. And but I always so I had my
Speaker 1: own clothes. I stitched in my shirts, I darn socks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a funny thing, right. And when something rips, I'll
Speaker 1: you know, my wife says, why don't you buy a
Speaker 1: new pair sweatpants and sid well, I can fix those,
Speaker 1: and it's very funny. So I'll sit there with a
Speaker 1: big thing and do a catch stitch on it, and yeah,
Speaker 1: and then and so you work all the time, and
Speaker 1: then you go to school and you you know, I
Speaker 1: would I would do the math club, and I'd go
Speaker 1: to basketball, and then I'd go out to a party,
Speaker 1: and then I'd work all weekend. So yeah, I just
Speaker 1: I just I work every day.
Speaker 2: Jim went off to Harvard Business School right after graduation.
Speaker 2: He could have gotten a job anywhere, but he chose Rim,
Speaker 2: right near where I grew up in Waterloo, Ontario. And
Speaker 2: RIM's rise was swift.
Speaker 1: It's important to understand that that Apple launched the iPhone
Speaker 1: in January two thousand and seven, and in response there
Speaker 1: was a very aggressive selling and marketing and device function.
Speaker 2: Apple supercharged the smartphone category the same way Starbucks supercharged cappuccinos,
Speaker 2: and in the beginning, Rim was able to ride that wave.
Speaker 1: So when they launched in two thousand and seven, we
Speaker 1: were three billion sales. The next year we grew to six.
Speaker 1: The next year we grew to eleven billion. The next
Speaker 1: year we grew to fifteen. The next year we grew
Speaker 1: to twenty billion. Fortune had us in the middle of
Speaker 1: that time the fastest growing company in the world. Smarter
Speaker 1: and sleeker now with real time turn by turn GPS navigation.
Speaker 1: It has the intelligence you require with the beauty you desire,
Speaker 1: the all new BlackBerry curve.
Speaker 2: I would drive through Waterloo in those years and see
Speaker 2: building after building after building with a big RIM logo
Speaker 2: on it. Even today, my mom lives across the street
Speaker 2: from a giant recreational center donated to the city by
Speaker 2: Rim back in now that era Rim Park. It is
Speaker 2: impossible not to have a certain amount of pride and
Speaker 2: affection for the guy who used to steal your jade
Speaker 2: tree and ended up a billionaire. And then at the
Speaker 2: very height of BlackBerry's success, Jim wanted to go left
Speaker 2: and the board of directors wanted to go right. But Jim,
Speaker 2: b this is a good moment for a reflection here,
Speaker 2: how are they not with you? You've built this thing,
Speaker 2: You've been this strategic force behind this extraordinary company. You're
Speaker 2: you know, the device is in the hands of President
Speaker 2: of the United States. I mean, like, how how is
Speaker 2: it that they could look at that, they would see
Speaker 2: what you had done for the company and look at
Speaker 2: come to this crucial fork in the road, and not
Speaker 2: even they don't even seem interested in your option.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, Mike and the new CEO Thorston didn't. They
Speaker 1: were hardware people, and Mike did say right in the
Speaker 1: end in a meeting before the board meeting, if we
Speaker 1: do this, it'll kill hardware. And I said, hardware is
Speaker 1: already dead. And and it's like I told him his
Speaker 1: dog just got hit by a car.
Speaker 2: When you look at your what you did, and where
Speaker 2: do you think the mistake lay?
Speaker 1: I think it's many things that you're touching on. One is,
Speaker 1: for sure, you're busy because you're flying around the world
Speaker 1: trying to enact this shift. I underestimated how a strategic
Speaker 1: shift is hard for people. You'd much rather have a continuum. Yeah,
Speaker 1: more time, for sure, more more preparation, more persuasion. I
Speaker 1: did not spend the time I needed to. I'd always
Speaker 1: driven the decisions, and they'd always been yes, of course,
Speaker 1: we'll do what I'm pushing. But ultimately the board held
Speaker 1: the power. So underestimated their power, underestimated how they were
Speaker 1: sold in their way of thinking.
Speaker 2: If we cut to the bottom line, here is you
Speaker 2: you have a notion of where the company's future lies,
Speaker 2: which turns out in retrospect to be accurate. Right, yours
Speaker 2: was the only path. There was no path, the right
Speaker 2: word fork in the road was only going to lead
Speaker 2: to disaster. There was no path that BlackBerry was going
Speaker 2: to emerge a winner by focusing on hardware.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's no there's no debate on that now.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there was at least a decent probability it could
Speaker 2: have come out on top or at least very healthy
Speaker 2: in the other path you had. You came up with
Speaker 2: this idea, You had an enormous amount of intellectual confidence
Speaker 2: in the accuracy of your decision. But what you what
Speaker 2: you overestimated, was that you you thought that having a
Speaker 2: great idea, well supported by evidence would be sufficient to
Speaker 2: win over a group of intelligent people. And what you
Speaker 2: discovered was actually no, A room full of allegedly intelligent
Speaker 2: people need more than an intellectual argument to win them over.
Speaker 2: They need to have You need to go out to
Speaker 2: dinner with them seven times and at a lovely restaurant
Speaker 2: and hold their hand and kind of, you know, make
Speaker 2: them feel like they're wanted and needed and that you're
Speaker 2: someone who they can trust, et cetera, etcetera, et cetera.
Speaker 2: That was the It was all that soft stuff that
Speaker 2: you underestimated the importance of. You thought it was what
Speaker 2: you needed was what you needed to be. You thought
Speaker 2: what was what was most important was to be right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and yeah no. I do a lot
Speaker 1: kind of in I do a lot in public policy.
Speaker 1: And my wife makes a joke. She says, Jim's was
Speaker 1: why convince when you can confuse?
Speaker 2: By the way, what's Jim doing as all this is
Speaker 2: going on trying to buy a National Hockey League franchise,
Speaker 2: the Pittsburgh Penguins in two thousand and six, the Nashville
Speaker 2: Predators in two thousand and seven, the Phoenix Coyotes in
Speaker 2: two thousand and nine. In each case, the franchises were
Speaker 2: struggling financially, and Jim proposed to move them to a
Speaker 2: big city in southern Ontario called Hamilton. Was Jim right
Speaker 2: to want to do this, of course he was. Southern
Speaker 2: Ontario is home to fourteen million people and at present
Speaker 2: has just one hockey team, the Toronto Maple Leafs, which
Speaker 2: is absolutely bananas. They could easily be three or even
Speaker 2: four more franchises in the Toronto region, and each would
Speaker 2: be more successful than almost any franchise in the entire league.
Speaker 2: But could Jim convince the other owners to let him
Speaker 2: do it?
Speaker 1: No? He couldn't.
Speaker 2: I'm wondering, isn't the Penguins story a version of this that?
Speaker 2: That was another case where you were right. The Penguin
Speaker 2: should not be in Pittsburgh. The Penguins should be in Hamilton. Right,
Speaker 2: You are a hundred percent correct. The future of the league.
Speaker 2: This is a terribly run league by a bunch of
Speaker 2: idiots who have not understood that Canada is the natural
Speaker 2: home for has way too few hockey teams, and Hamilton
Speaker 2: is would be one hundred times better as a home
Speaker 2: for the Penguins in Pittsburgh.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 2: So in both instances, the story of BlackBerry's Folk in
Speaker 2: the Road and the story of the Penguins, you are correct.
Speaker 2: And in both instances you cannot convince the board. In
Speaker 2: one case the rest of the owners and the other
Speaker 2: case the board of the company. You cannot convince them
Speaker 2: of the one hundred percent accuracy of your position.
Speaker 1: Had you done No, I think they're different because one
Speaker 1: just was never meant One was just never meant to be.
Speaker 1: It wasn't ever they weren't going to allow it to happen.
Speaker 2: Was it never going to happen? Is the one blind
Speaker 2: spot in the otherwise sublime mind of a man like
Speaker 2: Jim that he can't see how he could have made
Speaker 2: it happen. You were. Let me, let me, let me
Speaker 2: let me just I just want to one last point
Speaker 2: about Pittsburgh, the Penguins. I'm going to imagine a completely
Speaker 2: different Jim. Imagine. I'm gonna imagine if you are the
Speaker 2: schmoozer of schmoozers. You are the most kind of gregarious backslapping.
Speaker 2: You're everyone you know.
Speaker 1: You're like this.
Speaker 2: Beloved social bluh. You spend and you had wind and
Speaker 2: dined and got to know every single owner in the
Speaker 2: in the NHL, and then you had said to them
Speaker 2: you buy the Penguins. And then you say to them, guys,
Speaker 2: this is a bad hockey market.
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 2: Let me talk to you about a future of the
Speaker 2: league where blah blah blah blah. Right, is there not
Speaker 2: a version if you can't do it, because that's not
Speaker 2: who you are. But imagine a version of yourself where
Speaker 2: I shave off forty IQ points and I give you
Speaker 2: a a beer belly and an afshucks like you know,
Speaker 2: and an endless appetite for Martiniz and steaks, and I
Speaker 2: send you on a tour of all the good old
Speaker 2: boys who run NHL franchises. Do you get your way
Speaker 2: if you do it that way?
Speaker 1: If you're that person in hindsight, I don't think I
Speaker 1: see no chance.
Speaker 2: Go on, really, Oh come on, Jim, this is your mistake,
Speaker 2: This is your blind spot. Doesn't this drive you? Why
Speaker 2: am I the only one who's driven crazy by this?
Speaker 2: They are morons? They are morons. Well, it would have
Speaker 2: been very, very profitable. There's no question. We had facility,
Speaker 2: and we had the real estate. Yet it would have
Speaker 2: been very very proper. It is concentration of hockey fans
Speaker 2: in the entire world, with hockey fans with money in
Speaker 2: an underserved market who can't get any tickets.
Speaker 1: To That's the math. That's the math.
Speaker 2: Several times times during our conversation, Jim used the word
Speaker 2: heretic to describe the way other people at RIM, the board,
Speaker 2: and everyone else viewed him, and I think it's the
Speaker 2: perfect word. The heretic is the person who strays from
Speaker 2: the orthodoxy, but not quietly or passively. The heretic does
Speaker 2: it loudly, without regard for everyone else's sensibilities. I said
Speaker 2: at the beginning that when Jim and I came to
Speaker 2: Trinity from the sticks. Both of us were engaged in
Speaker 2: the project of figuring out how to fit in. We
Speaker 2: came in with chips on our shoulders, and we had
Speaker 2: to find a way to remove them without calling too
Speaker 2: much attention to ourselves. I think I was better at
Speaker 2: that than he was. My j tree William F. Buckley
Speaker 2: kept getting stolen because in nineteen eightys Canada, to openly
Speaker 2: affiliate with a conservative like William F. Buckley was a provocation.
Speaker 2: So when I got a second j tree, I called
Speaker 2: it run Dmtree. I put the lyrics on the side
Speaker 2: of the pot sucker. Jade tree can't grow much higher.
Speaker 2: All you other jade trees can call me sire, and
Speaker 2: no one ever stole my run Dmtree. There were simple
Speaker 2: ways to appease the Orthodoxy, but I don't think Jim
Speaker 2: really ever wanted to appease anyone. I think he just
Speaker 2: wanted to find the hole in the hedge. It's how
Speaker 2: he got out of Peterborough, It's how he made his
Speaker 2: way to Trinity. It's how he turned a little startup
Speaker 2: into a juggernaut. There's a famous psychology experiment from the
Speaker 2: nineteen fifties where infant monkeys are taken from their mothers
Speaker 2: and given a choice between two inanimate surrogates. Cloth Mother,
Speaker 2: a toy mother monkey that soft and cuddly, and wire Mother,
Speaker 2: a surrogate made out of steel wire holding a banana.
Speaker 2: Which did they choose cloth Mother? They went for short
Speaker 2: term comfort over long term survival. At the end of
Speaker 2: the day, I think the rimboard wanted a cloth mother
Speaker 2: and Jim was wire mother. They weren't rejecting BlackBerry messenger.
Speaker 2: They were rejecting Jim, And maybe Jim's mistake was simply
Speaker 2: that he didn't understand that for the rest of us monkeys,
Speaker 2: a banana isn't enough. Revisious History is produced by Ninabird Lawrence,
Speaker 2: Lucy Sullivan, and Ben Adaf Haffrey. Our editor is Karen Chakerji.
Speaker 2: Fact checking by Angelie Mercado. Our executive producer Jacob Smith.
Speaker 2: Engineering by Nina Bird Lawrence, original music by Luis Quarra,
Speaker 2: Sound design and mastering by Marcelo di'ela vera. I'm Malcolm Gladwell.