Luminous English

Decades before becoming a smartphone pioneer, Mike Lazaridis was recognized as a science prodigy. In middle school, he made the

local news for building a solar panel at the science fair and won an

award for reading every science book in the public library. If you

open his eighth-grade yearbook, you’ll see a cartoon showing Mike as

a mad scientist, with bolts of lightning shooting out of his head.

When Mike created the BlackBerry, he was thinking like a

scientist. Existing devices for wireless email featured a stylus that

was too slow or a keyboard that was too small. People had to clunkily

forward their work emails to their mobile device in-boxes, and they

took forever to download. He started generating hypotheses and sent

his team of engineers off to test them. What if people could hold the

device in their hands and type with their thumbs rather than their

fingers? What if there was a single mailbox synchronized across

devices? What if messages could be relayed through a server and

appear on the device only after they were decrypted?

As other companies followed BlackBerry’s lead, Mike would take

their smartphones apart and study them. Nothing really impressed

him until the summer of 2007, when he was stunned by the

computing power inside the first iPhone. “They’ve put a Mac in this

thing,” he said. What Mike did next might have been the beginning of

the end for the BlackBerry. If the BlackBerry’s rise was due in large

part to his success in scientific thinking as an engineer, its demise

was in many ways the result of his failure in rethinking as a CEO.

As the iPhone skyrocketed onto the scene, Mike maintained his

belief in the features that had made the BlackBerry a sensation in the

past. He was confident that people wanted a wireless device for work

emails and calls, not an entire computer in their pocket with apps for

home entertainment. As early as 1997, one of his top engineers

wanted to add an internet browser, but Mike told him to focus only

on email. A decade later, Mike was still certain that a powerful

internet browser would drain the battery and strain the bandwidth of

wireless networks. He didn’t test the alternative hypotheses.

By 2008, the company’s valuation exceeded $70 billion, but the

BlackBerry remained the company’s sole product, and it still lacked a

reliable browser. In 2010, when his colleagues pitched a strategy to

feature encrypted text messages, Mike was receptive but expressed

concerns that allowing messages to be exchanged on competitors’

devices would render the BlackBerry obsolete. As his reservations

gained traction within the firm, the company abandoned instant

messaging, missing an opportunity that WhatsApp later seized for

upwards of $19 billion. As gifted as Mike was at rethinking the

design of electronic devices, he wasn’t willing to rethink the market

for his baby. Intelligence was no cure—it might have been more of a

curse.

THE SMARTER THEY