"When a business declines it begins gradually, almost imperceptibly, until so many failures pile up that the unraveling arrives with unnerving speed."If you've regularly read my reviews, you'll know I enjoy a good biography/genesis story - how something got its start (Hilton, Disney, Starbucks, Amazon, Google) but often my lament is that the book ends before the story does - the companies continue to grow, evolve and innovate and that as I close the book, I'm already aware of enough new things they've done worthy of additional chapters or books.- Losing the Signal
This was one case where I didn't feel like that. While Research in Motion, nay, BlackBerry, still exists as a company, I felt that this book served as a post-mortem to what went wrong. The patient isn't dead, but all hope has been lost. (It's only a matter of time before they're sold for their patents to a company that would have paid much more for them just a few years ago.)
I'd wanted to read this book for some time, but had never gotten to it. Before a recent business trip I downloaded it to my Kindle and spent a lot of the flights wrapped up in what serves to be a good look at what can go wrong. So horribly, horribly wrong.
In 2000, I had a BlackBerry for work. It was an oversized pager with a small screen, probably 8 lines. At 6 am when it woke up, it would start chirping with new emails from the East Coast and when it went to sleep at 11 pm, I'd often wake it up to send one more email. I could send messages to a phone number and a robotic voice would read the message to the person. You could call a 1-800 number and someone would take your message and transcribe and it would arrive as an email on my BlackBerry.
I remember one trip up the 5 in Central California where there was something going on at work. Every time we'd hit a pocket of coverage, it would chirp, my wife would read it to me and then type a reply for me and quickly send before we drove back out of coverage.
I loved my BlackBerry. I was an addict. I left the company and my BlackBerry behind, but continued to hold a soft spot in my heart for them.
At that point, RIM was so far ahead of everyone else, it was their industry to lose. And that they did. Spectacularly. And it's tragic. And also a warning.
This book followed the two founders from their school days, the company's early days, the explosive growth, the misteps, the arrogance, the failure to listen to the marketplace, their customers, their partners. Before too long, it was too entrenched, there was too much to protect and they were willing to break rules and use their weight to protect and advance their cause at the expense of others. Sadly, the world moved on and it was really at their own expense.
This book is a compelling tale for any organization that forgets its way and looks inward, becomes protective, entrenched and unwilling or able to pivot, to listen to the marketplace or to kill sacred cows. It's sad, but what's sadder will be lessons that go unlearned by those who should read this but don't.
I would definitely pair this book with Chip Heath and Dan Heath's great book Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard.
Losing the Signal: The Untold Story
Behind the Extraordinary Rise
and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry
by Ally Condie - I liked 
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by Eve Silver. If you end up in a life-ending situation, you might be spared - if you are willing to occasionally go and fight aliens. Instead of dying, your life continues and every so often you're summoned to fight. After the fight, you're returned to your regularly scheduled life with no gap. But, if you die while fighting the aliens, life rewinds back to your original death and you die then. Interested in reading book 2.
by Denise Mina. The latest in the Det. Alex Morrow series. I always find these to be fascinating reads. A flawed character, more about her is revealed slowly and sometimes as if against her will. As with the other books, we're given backstory that she isn't and we're along for the ride. In the end, she figures things out and we're not always sure how she does it, especially since sometimes as a reader we think we've figured it out but we really haven't. It's really interesting reading about a character who -- while she doesn't know she's the focus of a book series -- acts as if she doesn't want to be. I almost gave up after the first book (
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