FIVE LEADERS TO WATCH
BlackBerry CEO John Chen a decisive player in firm’s future
David Olive rounds up 2014’s key business figures,
The most important line in interim CEO and executive chair John Chen’s open letter to BlackBerry Ltd.’s enterprise clients on Dec. 2 was: “BYOD (bring your own device) users may be able to bring any device to work, but it’s our job to ensure the risk doesn’t follow them in.” Chen, 58, may be an interim replacement for failed turnaround CEO Thorsten Heins. But since an imperiled BB’s fate will be determined in the coming months, Chen effectively is the decisive player in whether the company survives or is broken up and sold for scrap. The Hong Kong émigré, who turned around U.S. software maker Sybase Inc. and sold it to German software giant SAP AG for a handsome $5.8 billion (U.S.) — more than BB’s current market value of $3.2 billion — aims to curtail BlackBerry’s ill-fated foray into consumer mobility devices, and refocus on “our heritage and roots — delivering enterprise-grade, end-to-end mobile solutions.”
In short, Chen’s BB is offering to manage any and all mobility devices used by hospitals, government agencies, global corporations and other enterprise clients. Its high card in doing so is perhaps the one BB competence that’s never been questioned: security and encryption.
Yes, Pfizer Inc., the top global pharmaceutical firm, might recently have told its remaining BlackBerry users to “migrate” to non-BB devices because BB’s long-term future is in doubt. But a few days later, U.S. President Barack Obama told a group of young White House visitors that he’s obliged to use his BlackBerry, with its state-of-the-art security features, because the Secret Service won’t let him use any other device.
That’s BB’s future, if it has one — as a service provider and no longer as a devices maker. That might sound like a mere niche, but it’s exactly the transformation that a troubled IBM Corp. made under successful turnaround CEO Lou Gerstner.
And General Electric Co., too, relies more on servicing jet engines and power turbines than on making them for revenue.
BB is no IBM or GE, with customers reluctant to abandon a reliable, generations-old supplier. Then again, secure mobility is a relatively new field, pioneered largely by a BB from whom thousands of enterprise clients have not yet defected.
The headline-grabbing disclosures by Edward Snowden and reports of the U.S. National Security Agency spying on individuals, governments and corporations worldwide make for a compelling rationale for Chen’s intended reinvention of BB, a company whose best products never were matched by marketing prowess.