Tuesday 12 January 2010

Doughnuts and BlackBerrys

Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the BlackBerry, takes great pains to distance itself from a focus on shareholder value. Just after the firm's IPO in 1997 the founders made a rule that any manager who talked about the share price at work had to buy a doughnut for every person in the company.

Early infractions were not terribly painful, but that changed as the company grew. In 2001, the COO mentioned RIM's surging stock prince in the wake of a call with analysts and was saddled with the task of delivering more than 800 doughnuts to the next weekly meeting of employees. He even had to make special arrangements with local doughnut shops to get enough.

There hasn't been a recorded infraction of the doughnut rule since.

Source: 'The Age of Customer Capitalism', HBR, Jan-Feb 2010

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