Ride the wild surf

Even after spending a quarter of a century building Research In Motion, Mike Lazaridis remains deeply passionate about what he’s doing. “Mike is still a little-boy gadget freak. Whenever I see him at a trade show, he takes me aside, pulls out the latest toy, and he oohs and he aahs all over it,” says California-based wireless consultant Andy Seybold. “Mike is not driven by money. He is driven by ‘What can I do next to take this platform and turn it into something super cool yet again?’ And he keeps doing it.”

Co-CEO Jim Balsillie equates their roles at RIM in a roiling, competitive world with the wild ride of surfers. “It’s like a beach which has got three or four series of waves. You have the rolling waves here, but then you sort of have a semi, loosely coupled set of rolling waves over here, and you have a set here, and they’re all one body of interrelationships, and wave by wave by wave, you have to understand that they’re separate but not. Between Mike and I they’re highly, highly interrelated. You’re surfing these waves but you are not in control, you are definitely not in control. You just aim and hold on and tweak where you can.”