Dual Loyalty Hires as Organizational Wedge

“If Lazaridis chafed at an executive seen as “Jim’s guy,” Balsillie also didn’t think much of a senior executive that Lazaridis had recruited, his old friend David Neale. The long-time Rogers executive who had helped steer Lazaridis to wireless data in the 1980s joined RIM in April 2010 as a vice president, advising the founder on strategy and marketing. Neale and Balsillie disliked each other. Balsillie viewed Neale as an unquestioning yes man at a time Balsillie believed his partner needed to confront hard truths about the business. Neale in turn didn’t think highly of Balsillie’s behavior and brusque manner. “He and I did not enjoy an easy relationship,” says Neale. To other senior executives, Tobin and Neale seemed like two more wedges distancing the CEOs from each other. “The seeds [of division] I think were sown by the kind of people they were bringing on the team,” says Spence. “You see the distance because of the people they’re hiring; they’re not aligned on who is the right person for the organization.” Personality and style notwithstanding, Tobin was thrust into a difficult situation in his new job. Tobin didn’t meet Lazaridis until he started; at their first encounter, the founder grilled Tobin on his high-tech experience and declared that Tobin should really be working for him and not Balsillie if he expected to oversee a software business.5 “I realized every single meeting I had with Mike I had this awkward position of being a direct report to Jim in a meeting where Jim wasn’t there and I didn’t really know the status of their relationship at any given moment,” says Tobin. “I spent a lot of time with [Lazaridis] going, ‘So what exactly are you supposed to do?””

“Brenner was unwilling to give up part of his responsibilities and didn’t get along with Tobin. It took them months to negotiate the transfer of responsibilities and executives; Tobin wanted to control project management and set the road map for what services and apps would be developed, but the two never reached an agreement and that role largely stayed with Brenner. “I think Alan assumed that my job was to market and sell whatever [apps and services] he wanted to build, and my instructions were that he needed to build to what I required,” says Tobin. “Because the roles and responsibilities weren’t clear, it created some conflict. Alan felt he was capable of handling the business side as well as the technology side.” Balsillie didn’t agree—he felt Brenner should stick to technology—and Lazaridis didn’t care; when Tobin tried to escalate the issue to both Balsillie and Martin, he was redirected to Yach, Brenner’s boss, who sent him back to work things out with Brenner. To many it made no sense to split the responsibilities between two people; it just caused confusion and gridlock. “Those two jobs aren’t really separate,” said McDowell. “Tobin wasn’t looking for Brenner to tell him what to do, and Brenner wasn’t looking for Tobin to tell him what to do.… The net result is a stalemate.””