When Leaders Fail to Listen: What’s going on at RIM?

On BBC news, I recently ran across this disastrous interview with the RIM “co-CEO” Mike Lazaridis. Here’s the YouTube video.

Apparently, Mike doesn’t think it’s “fair” to be asked about a huge issue, with tons of press facing RIM in India right now. Unfortunately, refusing to talk about it doesn’t cancel out the hundreds of articles published online about the issue.

Today I found this article on CrunchGear. When asked about missing features, RIM’s other “co-CEO” Jim Balsilli is quoted “I don’t think that’s fair. A lot of the people that want this want a secure and free extension of their BlackBerry.”

The author of the article goes on to say, After reading the reviews around the net, I’m pretty convinced that the consistent message is no conspiracy and no accident. RIM felt they needed to put this device on the market, and they put it out leagues short of feature parity with the competition.

Business Insider wasn’t so nice, publishing Watch RIM CEO Jim Balsillie Squirm As He Defends Negative Playbook Reviews

Fair or unfair, RIM is losing the media war, and their approach isn’t helping. It used to be that you could control the message, but now social media, blogger journalists and word of mouth are far more powerful then any carefully crafted corporate message. RIM needs to engage at the grassroots if they hope to generate buzz and success for their products. Unfortunately, they have a limited window in which to start listening.