I’ll say one thing for co-chief executives: two scapegoats are better than one. Since Research in Motion’s fortunes took a sharp turn for the worse last year, its dual-leadership structure has taken a beating. With the BlackBerry-maker’s decision last week to revert to one chief executive, the double-edged knives really came out for Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis.
Four years ago, Canada’s favourite corporate twins won a place on Barron’s list of the world’s best CEOs (“two under-appreciated Northern lights”); now critics are blaming the double-headed organigram for prolonging RIM’s strategic agony.
These attacks place form above substance. The substantial case against RIM is that it has buckled under competitive pressure from an assault on its core smartphone market by two of the world’s largest and most aggressive technology companies – Apple and Google. The worst that can be said about the co-chiefs is that they failed to respond quickly enough to that challenge. But that is a charge that could be laid against companies that had the supposed advantages of single-CEO, buck-stops-here leadership, from Nokia to Motorola.