At the beginning of the Leadership Seminar I talk about Setting Direction and the power of interrogating reality constantly.  I have used Research In Motion as an example of a company that sat in a time warp for three years believing that its technology was competitive.  This is the company that created hand-held access to emails.  Apple and a number of clones passed them by and all along the co-CEO’s of RIMM kept telling shareholders and employees that the company was in a good position.   Were there open conversations in this company?  Were they doing ongoing environmental analysis?  These two CEO’s have presided over an 85% reduction in shareholder value.  This is a massive leadership failure.

I would love to hear some of your thoughts.

RIM LOSES MORE GROUND
By Chip Cummins and Will Connors
September 16, 2011; The Wall Street Journal

A crisis at Research In Motion Ltd. intensified Thursday when the maker of BlackBerry smartphones said it saw a year-over-year decline in shipments of the iconic devices, the first time that’s happened in nearly a decade.

RIM also said it shipped fewer than half of its PlayBook tablets than it did in the previous period.

The news rocked a company already buffeted by months of delayed product launches, profit warnings and investor unrest. RIM shares fell as much as 19% in after hours trading, to $19.04.

RIM shares have lost more than half their value this year. Thursday’s dive gives the company a market capitalization of just under $10 billion, representing less than 3% that ofApple Inc., a smartphone competitor that only emerged as a real player in the sector in recent years.

The disappointing shipment numbers have ratcheted up pressure on the company’s co-chiefs, Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, to show some sign that a transition at RIM—from a company once geared to delivering efficient, secure phones to corporate customers to one that caters to the more fickle tastes of retail consumers—is on track. The two have said phones that operate on a more powerful operating system, due out early next year, will help lure consumers, who have embraced Apple’s iPhone and devices that run off Google Inc.’s Android system.

“It’s clear RIM is suffering from the transition period it’s going through,” said Kevin Restivo, an analyst at International Data Corp. “The quarter was reflective of its legacy products, its older products, falling off.”

For its fiscal second quarter ended Aug. 27, RIM posted a profit of $329 million, a 59% fall from $797 million in the same quarter last year. On a per-share basis, net income was 63 cents a share, compared to $1.46 in the year-earlier period.

Revenue fell 10% to $4.17 billion, from $4.62 billion.

The declines came despite the start of an aggressive roll-out of new phones this summer, all operating off of a fresh upgrade of its current operating system.

Many analysts had expected that roll-out to bolster smartphone shipments somewhat. Instead, the company said it shipped fewer BlackBerrys in the period than it did in the year-ago quarter, the first time that has happened since early 2002, according to Mike Walkley, an analyst at Canaccord Genuity.

In a conference call after the results, Messrs. Balsillie and Lazaridis conceded PlayBook sales were weak, and blamed the falling shipment in BlackBerrys on customers forgoing purchases ahead of newer BlackBerry phones on the way. Mr. Balsillie said that those new phones—which RIM started rolling out in the summer—were available only for three weeks in the period for many customers.

He said a software upgrade planned for the PlayBook in October, and roll-out campaigns around the world for the new BlackBerrys, would boost sales of both devices in coming quarters. “We anticipate the acceleration of the uptick of BlackBerry devices for the remainder of the fiscal year and into 2012,” Mr. Balsillie said.

RIM shipped about 10.6 million BlackBerrys, compared to 12.1 million BlackBerrys in the period last year, and 13.2 million in the previous quarter.

RIM said it shipped just 200,000 PlayBooks, after it shipped 500,000 of the tablets in the first quarter. The devices had met with lackluster reviews at their debut in April.

“They certainly missed expectations, relative to what Wall Street was expecting,” said Mr. Walkley at Canaccord Genuity. “Only shipping 200,000 Playbook tablets, that’s a big disappointment.”

This summer RIM unveiled plans to roll out several new BlackBerry phones, powered by its latest operating system, BlackBerry 7. It is also expecting to launch its first phone powered by a more powerful QNX operating system early next year.