RIM Workers Respond to ‘BlackBerry Jam Manifesto’

Current and former Research In Motion employees are adding their two cents after Boy Genius Report posted an anonymous letter Thursday outlining the strategic, cultural and execution issues seen inside the company.

BGR has posted a couple more anonymous letters echoing and expanding on that first one — which we have dubbed the BlackBerry Jam Manifesto, in tribute to the now-infamous Peanut Butter Manifesto that Brad Garlinghouse penned at Yahoo.

The new letters include one from a person who says he or she is a former worker still pulling from RIM, and another from a worker bemoaning the challenges facing his or her team due to a lack of leadership at the company.

For its part, RIM posted a response to the initial letter on Thursday, essentially shrugging off the concerns and saying it is well aware of the challenges facing the company.

“RIM recently confirmed that it is nearing the end of a major business and technology transition,” the company said. “Although this transition has taken longer than anticipated, there is much excitement and optimism within the company about the new products that are lined up for the coming months.”

But optimism is not what is stated in either the original manifesto or the follow-up letters posted on Friday. Rather, the workers express an urgent need for focus and execution, something outsiders have been calling for as well.

In one of the new letters, a RIM employee discusses how his team is — as Garlinghouse argued Yahoo was — spread too thin.

“My small team of people has over 75 projects assigned to us right now,” the employee writes in the letter, one of two posted on BGR on Friday. “Why? Because leaders are afraid to say no. And we’re not the only ones — if you polled the various teams around operations, you’d probably find each and every team / individual has a list that is completely unattainable. But, no one is putting a foot down to say ‘ok, enough.'”