John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

RIM Co-CEOs May Lose Co-Chairman Roles

The committee reviewing Research In Motion’s governance structure has evidently come to the same conclusion the company’s critics reached months ago: RIM is in need of a corporate shakeup.

And the Financial Post reports that one may well be in the works. It says that RIM is considering stripping co-CEOs Mike Lazardis and Jim Balsillie of their chairman titles, and tapping independent director Barbara Stymiest, former COO of Royal Bank of Canada, as their replacement.

Were that to occur, it would begin to answer some of the renewed calls for leadership changes at RIM, specifically those of activist shareholder Jaguar Financial, which has been pushing for the replacement of Lazaridis and Balsillie.

“It strains credibility to believe that a CEO requires the title of Chairman to sell RIM products but the RIM directors have apparently bought into this unconvincing rationale,” Jaguar said back in December. “Jaguar believes that considering the experience Ms. Stymiest and Mr. Martin (director Roger Martin) bring to RIM’s Board of Directors, they should step up and take the lead in making dramatic governance change or else resign from the Board if they are unable or unwilling to initiate appropriate governance changes.”

Evidently, RIM’s board took that message to heart. We’ll find out just how much by late February. Reached for comment, RIM would say only that the committee of independent directors assigned to review its governance structure was on track to report its findings by Jan. 31, 2012, with the board scheduled to publicly respond to them within 30 days.

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald