Yearly Archive: 2010

Ken McGuffin, manager of media relations at the Rotman School of Management, emailed me today to say that he’s in Mumbai and saw my BlackBerry book on the shelves in the several bookstores he visited. “Unfortunately,” he quipped, “you’re not a hit here until the guy on the sidewalk selling the counterfeit books is selling it as well.” I take his point. BlackBerry is about to go on sale in China. I have this nightmare that one copy is sold and then the rest are pirated. In fact, such activity is already happening right here in North America. There’s a...

What does a company have to do to drive share price higher? Research In Motion yesterday announced excellent first quarter results: revenue up 24 per cent, earnings up 41 per cent and shipments up 43 per cent. In total, RIM has shipped more than 100 million BlackBerrys, about twice as many as Apple has sold iPhones. To put this success in another context, in its first five years of BlackBerry sales from 1999-2004, RIM signed up a total of one million subscribers. During the most recent three-month period, RIM signed up almost five million new subscribers. If you thought such...

Just back from a swing through Washington, D.C., where old friends Betsy and Charlie Rackley held a reception to celebrate the launch of my book in the U.S. The food was international: Georgia peaches, North Carolina shrimp and Quebec cheese. In addition to bookstores in the District, I also checked out stock in northern Virginia and found BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion to be widely available and well displayed. No one, not even Democrats, thought President Obama did well in his Oval Office speech about BP and the Gulf of Mexico. I thought he was all angles...

Excellent review of my BlackBerry book in the Financial Times of London, my first ever in that esteemed publication. Always a treat to have your writing style called ‘jaunty.’ Here’s the link.

BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion is now available as an e-book through Kobo. You can download it and read it on any mobile device including a BlackBerry. Price is $16.89, half the cost of the hardcover edition. Here’s the link.

Time was when a book came out in hard cover, a paperback edition followed a year later, and then maybe another year or two would pass before you’d find your baby in the remainder bin. Bookstores would slash the original $26.95 price down to $6.95 or lower. Next came the rise of Alibris and Abebooks. At first the online sites sold only used books but for the last couple of years they’ve also been selling new books at a discount of 40 per cent or more. Today, the time between publication and a price drop has become about three months....

BlackBerry: The Inside Story of Research In Motion has been chosen for J.P. Morgan’s 2010 Summer Reading List. JPM bankers around the world submit non-fiction books for consideration (this year there were 450 titles nominated) from which ten are chosen. “If you can’t live like the rich this summer, at least you can read like them,” says the Wall Street Journal. “It’s kind of a book club for billionaires, without the tedious monthly get-togethers over cheese and chardonnay.” In addition to BlackBerry, this year’s eleventh annual list also includes: On the Brink, by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; Life is What...

Congratulations to Jeff Rubin whose book, Why Your World Is About To Get A Whole Lot Smaller, has won the 2010 National Business Book Award. The $20,000 prize was presented today during a swank luncheon at the Toronto Four Seasons Hotel. My book about Manulife had been shortlisted along with books by Wendy Dobson, Buzz Hargrove and John DeMont. The book by Rubin, a former economist at CIBC, has been published in 13 countries and seven languages. Noting that no one has ever won twice in the 25-year history of the award, Rubin, who won with his first book, quipped:...

While I was researching my book about BlackBerry I kept looking for and asking about employees of Research In Motion who had departed to start their own tech companies. Where will the next Mike Lazaridis come from if not from within RIM, I wondered? The feeling was that people were happy at RIM. In a growing company there is plenty of room to satisfy all urges, even those of entrepreneurship. Recently, however, I have been hearing anecdotal evidence that RIM is beginning to spawn startups. That’s good. We need more RIMs in Canada; such companies create jobs. What’s even more...

The Globe and Mail is running audio and print excerpts from the five books nominated for the National Business Book Award. My book about Manulife, published last year, is among them. If you want to hear my dulcet tones, here’s the link: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-investor/rod-mcqueen-how-dominic-dalessandro-built-a-global-giant-and-fought-to-save-it/article1585077/

On a visit to Michigan during this Memorial Day weekend in the U.S., I visited Borders on Woodward Avenue in Birmingham. I know, I know, I recently said I would not be going into bookstores to check on stock, but hey, this is the first book I’ve ever written that’s been available in the U.S. Indeed, they had copies of my latest book, BlackBerry. I spoke to a clerk and offered to autograph stock. She produced a Sharpie for me to use but, before I began, I asked:  “Don’t you want to check the author photo to make sure I...

An interview by Allan Gregg about my new book, BlackBerry, runs on TvOntario a week from today, Friday June 4, at 10 p.m. Gregg always does a great job because he not only reads the book but also thinks about his questions in advance. Moreover, he’s one of the few members of the media who does a 30-minute interview, thus offering an author the opportunity to talk about some of the themes in the book rather than be limited to two or three brief answers and one anecdote. There’s a preview at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzPjPWFIs1E

In the olden days, when their majesties came to call, households spent months in preparation for the royal visit. Fatted calves were killed and entire wings of the mansion were revamped. In some instances, spa towns such as Royal Tunbridge Wells were renamed in their honor. Well, get ready Royal Waterloo. On July 5, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip will be touring the production facilities at Research In Motion as part of their nine-day visit to Canada. The modern manufacturing site features “pick-and-place” robotics machines worth $750,000 apiece for the initial assembly but every BlackBerry is finished by hand in...

There’s been a lot of blather of late among bloggers who claim that Research In Motion is working on a tablet to compete with the iPad. The source is said to be an insider; the code name for the device is Cobalt. I think this is all just so much bunkum. But first, two caveats. One, I haven’t interviewed anyone at RIM for six months since my book was finalized. Two, they never revealed anything to me about any new device until the official release. Still, I have a sense of the place in general and co-CEO Mike Lazaridis in...

I’m proud to announce that “Manulife: How Dominic D’Alessandro Built a Global Giant and Fought to Save It” has been shortlisted for the National Business Book Award. I’ve already won an NBBA in 1997 for “Who Killed Confederation Life?” so won’t win for Manulife because no author has ever won twice in the award’s 25-year history. I am, however, in excellent company with the other nominees of books published in 2009: journalist John DeMont on coal, economist Wendy Dobson on the Asian economy, the memoirs of Buzz Hargrove and former CIBC economist Jeff Rubin on oil. The award, which comes...