Rapid Motion

Design Principle #1: Build the Factory Next to the Gold Mine

Research In Motion is located in Waterloo, an industrial city of about 98,000 people that sits on the outer edge of southwestern Ontario's Mennonite country. RIM's world headquarters is similarly unprepossessing: a squat two-story building surrounded by minimal landscaping and modest signage. Inside, it's cube land to the max, a dead-on reflection of the company's personality: ultrabland. Asked to define the company's purpose, Jim Balsillie, 40, RIM's chairman and co-CEO, responds with this less-than-inspiring mission statement: "to push data packets to your hip." Patrick Spence, a 27-year-old salesman who looks even younger than he is, sums up RIM's culture this way: "We're a little weird. We think it's fun to be serious."

Fair enough. But you can't help but wonder: How could something as cool as the BlackBerry come out of a company as dull as RIM? An answer starts to emerge when Lazaridis replies to a slightly more diplomatic question: "Why did you headquarter the company in Waterloo?"

A heavyset man with a thick thatch of silver hair, a modest demeanor, and by all accounts an off-the-charts IQ, Lazaridis offers a succinct reply: "Because we wanted to build the factory next to the gold mine." Loose translation: The "factory" is RIM itself. And the "gold mine," it turns out, is a three-minute walk from RIM's back door, on the far side of an employee parking lot: the William G. Davis Computer Research Centre at the University of Waterloo, one of the most respected, yet most unsung, computer-science schools in North America, and a hunting ground for some of technology's leading luminaries, including Cisco and Microsoft.

But neither tech titan has RIM's advantage. All day long, the school's math wizards must cross RIM's campus as they walk to class. Until recently, Elizabeth Roe Pfeifer, 35, RIM's chief headhunter, worked out of a corner office that looked directly into the school's computer lab. RIM's recruiters know all of the top students, many of whom spend four months or more interning at the BlackBerry maker before they graduate. All told, about 20% of RIM's employees attended Waterloo, including employee number one, Mike Lazaridis.

Building next to the gold mine is a clever strategy for winning high-end human capital, and RIM's executives credit it as a critical reason for their success. RIM's code crunchers might be boring and bland, but they are also disciplined and driven. Lazaridis has been working on wireless technology for nearly two decades and on wireless data networks since the late 1980s. While still a student in the University of Waterloo's engineering-and-computer-science program, he designed a local-area network that ran industrial displays. In 1984, General Motors offered to buy the displays for use on its assembly lines, and Lazaridis had to decide between completing his degree or accepting the $600,000 contract from GM. He chose the latter, dropped out of school just one month shy of graduating, and launched Research In Motion. The name derives from his belief that research and engineering excellence would drive the company's growth. And "motion"?

"That means we never stop, we never end," Lazaridis replies. "We keep going."

Design Principle #2: Design Your Product for You

The BlackBerry has the feel of an overnight sensation, but the journey to build it dates back to 1989. Lazaridis and his design team wrote some gateway software that would let users run a wireless email account on a Hewlett-Packard 95LX Palmtop PC, which came with a flip-up LCD screen and was powered by two AA batteries. They hooked up the Palmtop to Ericsson's first portable Mobitex data modem and -- voila -- they brought the world's first wireless-email solution to market -- a market that, at least initially, consisted solely of RIM's own employees. At a time when the worldwide population of wired email users consisted of professors and scientists on ARPANET, Research In Motion built wireless email for Research In Motion.

"We were a small company, and we spent most of our time on the road," Lazaridis recalls. "We were always looking for tools that would make us more efficient. Email made us more efficient. So at least at the start, we were our own customers."

Even in the early 1990s, when email was largely unknown to corporate America, RIM's engineers and salespeople were email power users. Lazaridis printed an AT&T Easy Link wireless email address on his business card -- and found himself apologizing to people who had never heard of email. Justin Fabian, RIM's 31-year-old VP of marketing channels, recalls showing off his email address to some friends at Microsoft -- which hadn't yet put email addresses on its cards.

Once they had endowed HP's Palmtop with wireless capabilities, RIM's engineering team kept advancing the concept. They built a wireless Type II card for the HP 200LX, which came equipped with a PCMCIA slot -- slide the PC card into the slot, and you've got a complete, self-contained wireless email device. The gizmo was too large to wear on your belt, but it was small enough to carry around in your briefcase.

"Our employees started taking these things home, and they wouldn't return them," says Lazaridis. "That's when we knew we were onto something. We had discovered that always-on, always-connected wireless email was completely addictive. The challenge now was to make it practical."