Re-post from canadianbusiness.com:
Interview: BlackBerry CEO John Chen on the progress of his turnaround
“People don’t necessarily love what I say, but they know it’s the truth”
Joe Castaldo
One well-known problem at BlackBerry concerned decision-making. It wasn’t clear who was responsible for what. What are you doing to fix that?
That’s a very complicated science. We’re working it out right now. It’s about who has what authority to make what decision, and how does the system have accountability when that person makes the wrong decision. This is typical of turnaround situations. I’ve tackled this problem before, in my past companies. When a company grows very fast, like BlackBerry did, a few heroes of the company make most of the decisions, but they may not be documented or logical decisions. And when a company starts doing poorly, a lot of people who actually help the company day-to-day start leaving, furthering the damage. What I’m doing is going in and defining how things ought to be done. The first pendulum swing is pretty extreme, from no process to too much process. That’s happening now. Now I need to make the pendulum swing back a bit. It’ll take a while. I wouldn’t expect more than a year or two.
Do you envision BlackBerry remaining a niche enterprise player, or becoming something else?
It has to be more than that. The first step is becoming profitable. It will still be niche at that point, but there’s no reason why we wouldn’t become bigger. I’ll refer you to Apple. In 1997, Apple almost went out of business. Nobody was buying a Mac. At that time, they were niche in the educational market. Look at them today. The point is, in the technology world, successful turnarounds are rare, but the number isn’t zero. IBM got turned around. HP is going through that process. Oracle got turned around. I can’t guarantee success, but it is doable. When I came in, I said I need six to eight quarters to get the company stabilized. We’re a little ahead, so we’ll make that objective. A year from today, we’ll be generating profit.
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