Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry (3 page)

Basement quests grew more sophisticated after Lazaridis received a secondhand copy of
The Boy Electrician,
a chatty how-to guide for understanding and building electrical machines, radios, and other equipment. Lazaridis still cherishes the worn book like an old friend, but his early adventures with
The Boy Electrician
were frustrating. When he was able to scrape together money for needed parts, he discovered Windsor stores didn’t stock items he needed, probably because his guidebook was published in 1914. Rather than discouraging Lazaridis, the setbacks deepened his determination, instilling in him a lifelong attention to thrift. If he could not afford or find materials, he would make them. There was always another way if you were smart and resourceful.

Lazaridis’s best friends shared his love of science. Ken Wood’s mom was a science teacher who provided ingredients for backyard experiments involving gunpowder, iodine bombs, and handmade rockets. His second pal, Doug Fregin, was a slight, painfully shy boy with thick glasses and a lazy eye who escaped teasing by building model planes. After Wood’s family moved, Fregin became Lazaridis’s shadow. “They were always together,” says Bob Oxford, a longtime school classmate. Although neither science whiz joined other boys in daily games of hockey and football, both were welcomed into the neighborhood.

“They were accepted because everyone liked Mike,” Oxford explains.

While Lazaridis read every science book at the local library, Fregin applied model-making skills to soldering circuit boards and wiring equipment. The
Boy Electrician
projects became more complex. After a neighbor, a ham radio operator, gave them some used equipment, Lazaridis and Fregin hit the big time at a grade 7 science fair. Surrounded by tattered paper volcanoes and wobbly constellations, Lazaridis and Fregin’s entry was a solar panel fashioned out of wood, tinfoil, light sensors, and a relay system attached to a small motor. A roaming TV crew showcased the impressive invention on the local news.
Celebrity ensued. The school’s eighth-grade yearbook featured a caricature of Lazaridis as a mad scientist with thunderbolts bursting from his head.

At W. F. Herman, Lazaridis encountered his first roadblock, a segregated world divided into two castes. The building’s second floor was home to the school’s elite science, math, and business classes. The first floor was devoted to electrical and machine shops. Second-floor kids went on to university, first-floor grads went to manufacturing jobs. John Micsinszki’s wife, Margaret, remembers that her university-educated husband and other tech teachers “had no great love for the guidance department at Herman, where good academic students were discouraged from taking technical courses, even if the student intended to study engineering at university.”

All this was initially a challenge for Lazaridis, a kid with a foot on both floors of W. F. Herman. He got around the problem by ignoring boundaries. A devoted math and science student, Lazaridis wasn’t about to give up the chance to apply years of basement experiments to well-stocked machine shops. At first he was disappointed with the presumptuous second-floor teachers. “I didn’t like the way they looked down at us,” he says. Eventually, those instructors realized Lazaridis’s electrical prowess had classroom benefits. Students struggling with math turned to Lazaridis, who would explain how complex formulas could be applied to everyday use, such as electricity. In shop, it was “Laz” that the kids turned to for help operating machines. “He basically taught everyone how to use all the equipment. He had a way of explaining it so we understood,” Oxford recalls.

The greatest lesson he learned in high school came off-campus. As an electronics teacher and president of a ham radio club, Micsinszki introduced both Lazaridis and Fregin to the world of transistors and cathode-ray tubes. Before long, Lazaridis and Fregin were dropping by the Micsinszki home to talk shop. Margaret Micsinszki, one of the city’s first high school computer science teachers, introduced the boys to computing advances. Taking advantage of afterschool tutelage, Lazaridis built his own oscilloscope, Fregin perfected circuit making, and they each built computers. Margaret was convinced that computer science would lead the next wave of modern innovation. Her husband saw a bigger future. “Don’t get too seduced by these computers,” he warned. “The person who puts wireless communications and computers together is really going to build something special.”

Lazaridis never had to write that down. “The day he said that,” he says, “it never left us.”

The men’s dining hall at Trinity College was in giddy, anarchic chaos. Dinner buns were flying, tables were being thumped, and jeers were rising to the timbered rafters. Solemn chancellors from the century-old University of Toronto college looked on from their oil portraits, as they might have at Hogwarts, as a peculiar ritual unfolded. A first-year student had committed some unpardonable act and was now being “poored out.” Lying prone on one of the hall’s long trestle tables, holding onto the edge for dear life with the help of a few friends, the young man on trial struggled to stay put as the rest of the dining hall attempted to yank the human centerpiece onto the floor.

“Out, out, out,” shouted dozens of jubilant men dressed in floor-length robes. Overseeing this tug-of-war was an older student eyeing his wristwatch. If the boy on trial could hang on for a full minute, he was allowed to leave the dining hall of his own volition. If not, he would be dragged from the room, shamed and ridiculed. The clock ticked, food and shouts filled the air. Then finally …

“Done!” the student proctor exclaimed, “Balsillie may walk.”

As friends cheered, the first-year student stood, breaking into a wide grin as he adjusted his disheveled robe and sauntered out of the wood-paneled hall. Few walked away once targeted in a pooring-out ritual that was as old as the dining hall’s wood-paneled walls. Most were pulled from tables or chairs within seconds. The punishment was meant to discourage “poor” behavior by first-year students. At Trinity, where most students descended from political and business bluebloods, stepping out of line usually amounted to breaches of old-world British civility. Poor table manners or boasting could prompt a pooring out. The ritual would fall victim to political correctness in later years, but not soon enough for Balsillie, a frequent target in his first year at Trinity in 1980.

According to former classmates, his offense was, almost always, trying too hard. Shortly after arriving at the castle-like gray stone college to earn a commerce degree, Balsillie was elected president of his year, earned a spot on the school’s lacrosse team, and began organizing hockey and football matches. “You always had the impression that he had something to prove,” says Andrew Coyne, a Trinity student at the time who went on to be a leading Canadian political columnist with Toronto’s
National Post.

In his first weeks at university, Balsillie drove himself hard, closeting himself in his dorm room to study, allowing only fifteen-minute breaks every hour to check the score of televised hockey games. When friends dragged him out one night to a frat party, he got home late and in no mood to study for an exam the next day. He aced it anyway and emerged from the experience with a new mantra: “Work hard, party hard.”

Few students were as devoted to academic and social success, a relentless all-hours ambition that earned him the nickname “Balls.” Balsillie organized theme parties celebrating obscure brews, like Carling Cinci lager, or the films of his favorite character, James Bond. When asked to help organize formal affairs, he displayed a unique talent for stretching a student budget by visiting funeral homes late in the business day in search of free, slightly used flowers to decorate the college’s party rooms for formal dinners and dances. His vintage Volkswagen Beetle was often so stuffed with used floral arrangements that he could only see by poking his head through a thicket of ferns. He gamely agreed to grow a beard and perform in a short film about the perils of technology made by fellow Trinity student and future Oscar-nominated filmmaker Atom Egoyan called
A Clockwork Trinity.

Balsillie was equally creative about studying. After forging friendships in residence with ambitious students who, like him, arrived from small towns with few connections, he organized a study club so members could share and discuss homework. The group included Malcolm Gladwell, from Elmira, Ontario, who would become the author of several bestsellers, including
The Tipping Point, Blink,
and
Outliers.
Another study-clubber was Nigel Wright, from Ancaster, Ontario, who would go on to become one of Canada’s leading financiers and chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

At Trinity, Wright says Balsillie was “a force of nature,” juggling multiple challenges with unlimited energy. He threw the best parties, excelled in sports, and ensured homework club members were prepared for exams. Study sessions were usually held in his room and snacks were plentiful. As they swapped notes, members also shared their ambitions. In Balsillie, Wright saw someone who was determined to change a world he believed was stacked against people who shared his working-class background and lack of connections. “His basic position was that he was not going to accept the world as it was. He was determined and dogged about obtaining his objective,” Wright says. In those heady days at Trinity, Wright believed Balsillie’s ambition would take him to Wall Street or a Fortune 500 company.

Following the career path he had mapped out from Newman’s elite business guide,
The Canadian Establishment,
Balsillie landed a job at the accounting firm Clarkson Gordon after graduating from Trinity. Unlike other ambitious new hires jockeying for positions on big corporate accounting teams, Balsillie opted to join a smaller group that represented entrepreneurial owners of rapidly growing companies. At Clarkson Gordon, Balsillie learned two lessons: first, he did not like accounting; second, new business computing tools were leverage in the hands of an adept junior manager. Balsillie’s talent for managing data and financial analysis with early spreadsheet programs got him a seat at takeover tables with senior managers and clients who wanted quick financial breakdowns as negotiations and terms shifted.

“All of a sudden,” Balsillie says, “[I was] a rock star, you’re in all the partner meetings. They’d say, ‘Just bring Jim in.’ ”

After two years of spreadsheets, Balsillie achieved his final academic objective—acceptance into the masters program at Harvard Business School. By now he was dating Heidi Henschel, a rehab therapist from southern Ontario, who followed him to Boston in 1987. The couple managed Harvard’s staggering tuition costs with the help of a fellowship and Balsillie’s part-time income from managing a student guidebook and advising for a small financial services firm in Boston. At Harvard, Balsillie found few Canadian small-town peers. Classes were filled with ambitious, privileged students from the United States and other countries—cultured keeners competing for grades that would land them blue-chip business jobs. In his class of ninety MBA students, Balsillie says, “I felt there were eighty-nine Nobel Prize winners and one fraud.”

The Canadian outsider learned to overcome his insecurity with humor. The edgy barbs that landed him in boiling water in grade school had morphed into nuanced parodies of professors, many of them aging business chiefs. He became so good at mimicking teachers that classmates captured his act on video. In one he stuffed a pillow up his shirt and waved menthol cigarettes and a can of cream soda as he ummed and ahhed through a lecture. The skewered professor delighted his class in his final lecture by airing Balsillie’s parody. “This was huge,” Balsillie remembers. “All of a sudden your social cachet goes to the moon.”

Just as promising were Balsillie’s career choices. He interviewed with a number of prestigious Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs, but his master plan took an unexpected turn in his final year when he met a group
of business chiefs from the Young Presidents’ Organization at a campus cocktail party in early 1989. When Balsillie arrived at the event, one of his classmates steered him to a tall, lean businessman with penetrating blue eyes. A fellow Canadian, Rick Brock warmed immediately to the animated student, inviting his new friend to dinner with a group of other presidents. The young entrepreneurs shared stories, offering frank advice about corporate and personal challenges. Balsillie felt like a business insider for the first time. When it was his turn to talk, Balsillie revealed his humble roots and lofty ambitions.

“I was impressed,” says Brock. So impressed, he ordered a limousine and ferried Balsillie to a series of Boston bars. Near the end of the evening, Brock slapped more than a drink on the table. “Why don’t you come and learn to run a business?” he asked. The business was Sutherland-Schultz, a midsized electronic equipment maker based near Waterloo, Ontario. Brock could offer only half of what Balsillie could make on Wall Street, but he convinced the student that a senior job at his plant would teach him more about operating a company than he could ever learn as a banker. When Brock woke up the next morning with a screaming headache, he reached for the phone and dialed Balsillie’s number. “Remember that offer I gave you last night?” Brock asked. “I was afraid you wouldn’t,” came a nervous reply.

Balsillie was on his way back to Ontario. His friends were stunned by his career choice. Wall Street was the number one destination of any aspiring finance grad. It was the nerve center of what was then the biggest corporate takeover binge in history. Junk bonds, buyout barbarians, and Michael Milken were such household names that Hollywood named a blockbuster movie
Wall Street.
Balsillie’s Harvard peers had never heard of Waterloo and Canadian friends knew nothing of Sutherland-Schultz. “We were astonished. It didn’t seem to fit Jim’s game plan,” said Wright.

What they failed to grasp was that Balsillie’s career vision had shifted: new spreadsheet applications at Clarkson Gordon revealed to him the power of technology. Lining up for job interviews with Fortune 500 companies, he realized he would be competing for years to make his way to the senior ranks. That prospect didn’t interest him. Balsillie even sabotaged an interview with influential strategy consultant McKinsey & Company, giving wiseacre answers and accusing an interviewer of asking “stupid” questions. Brock was willing to give him an executive title immediately in a company that was just starting to automate manufacturing systems with computers. “I realized the only
way I was going to make it [fast] in this world is by rewriting business rules,” Balsillie says, “and technology is an opportunity to rewrite business rules.”