RIMM New CEO Thorsten Heins: Into RIM's Ring of Fire

The company is debt-free and sits atop $2 billion in cash. It currently has 77 million subscribers. Sales outside the U.S.—particularly in Indonesia, South Africa, and Venezuela—remain strong. Later this year, RIM will put an entirely new operating system into wide release in conjunction with the launch of a line of BlackBerry 10 smartphones. Heins says it will redefine mobile multitasking, enamor RIM to the app-developer community, and arm the company with a “future-proof” platform.

As the all-important rollout of the BlackBerry 10 approaches, Heins says RIM will be reaching out to enterprise customers and working with them to upgrade their employees’ BlackBerrys with the newer, more nimble models. Heins believes that RIM’s troubles in the U.S. stem from its failure to anticipate what he calls the BYOD, or Bring Your Own Device, movement—in which the company’s core white-collar customers began replacing their corporate-distributed BlackBerries with Apple and Android-powered smartphones from home.

Heins says he has a plan to alleviate RIM’s existential crisis, and the discipline to make the company hyper-efficient. “The first thing you need to do with your employees is you’ve got to be open,” says Heins. “Tell them where we are. They’re thinking it themselves anyways. You cannot sit there and say, ‘Hooray, hooray, I’m rocking in the U.S.’ if you aren’t. So you have that realism there. But also, you have to get them excited about the future of BlackBerry.” Then Heins leans forward in his chair, peers over the top of his glasses. “I don’t like to be dictatorial, but if I have to, I can be,” he adds. “Right now at RIM, I’m a bit dictatorial.”

RIM expanded so fast, for so many years—its revenue went from $300 million in fiscal 2003 to $3 billion in fiscal 2007—that projects proliferated out of control. Heins says one of the problems he has diagnosed since taking over as CEO is organizational inefficiency. He’s found engineers tasked with working on multiple, sprawling initiatives at the same time, with everybody having a hand in everything. Accountability is a mess.

“I love this Canadian word—huddle,” says Heins. “You know, you ‘huddle around things.’ Sometimes we huddle for too long. You’ve got to have a point where somebody says, ‘I get all the arguments. It’s decision time. I’m accountable for this whole thing.’”‰” …

At the same time, RIM’s current success in emerging markets is likely to come under increasing pressure from low-cost, discount handset vendors. Serious threats abound on the high and low ends of the market.