1 / / / REACH FOR THE TOP
The students at Prince of Wales Public School had long since stopped paying attention to Reg Nicholls squeaking away on the blackboard. Every few minutes the math teacher frowned, erasing part of his work. Then: more numbers, a spiraling out-of-control formula, and that awful scraping of chalk on blackboard. Finally, the classroom fell silent. Poor Nicholls stood motionless. "Can anyone tell me where I went wrong?" he asked.
An answer came from the back of the room: "When you were born."
The room erupted. Nicholls raced to the back of the class, dragging his heckler into the hallway. The sputtering, mottle-faced instructor pinned twelve-year-old Jim Balsillie against a wall of lockers. Balsillie stared right back at Nicholls. Balsillie's real punishment came the next day when he was kicked out of math. He'd have to study on his own for the rest of term. See how far that gets you, his teacher said. Oh, and you're still going to have to join classmates for the compulsory provincewide math test in a couple of weeks.
Later that month, Balsillie rejoined his class for the big test at the Peterborough, Ontario, school. The smart-ass, it turns out, really was smart. Studying all on his own, the lippy twelve-year-old math castoff scored first in the grade 7 test, not just at Prince of Wales but in the entire province. A regional superintendent traveled to the school to bestow the 1974 math honor on him. When he raced home to tell his mom, Laurel, about winning the award, she just shook her head, laughing, repeating a line she often used to sum up her difficult middle child: "Jim, you always fall in shit and come up smelling like roses."
Getting in trouble was relatively easy in Peterborough's working-class west end, where houses were small and ambitions were oversized; where lawns doubled as parking lots and sports games frequently ended in fights. Young Jim, the middle of three children born within three years, fit right in with the time and territory. "I was always a troublemaker," he says, "mouthy and cocky." Growing up, Balsillie played a lot of hockey and lacrosse and loved watching Peterborough Petes junior hockey games at Memorial Centre with his father, who had seasons tickets. Many Petes players made it to the NHL-including Bob Gainey and Steve Yzerman-and Balsillie dreamed of one day following them and returning to his hometown with hockey's greatest trophy, the Stanley Cup.
Even more important to Balsillie than Petes players was the team's coach. "The leading figure in my eyes was Roger Neilson-an innovative coach in so many ways." Neilson was junior hockey's infamous trickster. When pulling his goalie for an extra attacker, Roger had his net-minder leave his stick across the mouth of the crease to stop long shots. When he was managing a local baseball team, Neilson had a catcher hide a pared apple in his equipment. When a runner for the other team dangled off third base, the catcher fired the apple over his third basemen's head. The jubilant runner then dashed home, smiling, only to be touched out with the real ball by Roger Neilson's catcher at home plate.
When he wasn't pulling a fast one, Neilson fought the rules. That's how he became known as "Rule Book Roger." The establishment-referees and umpires, who were league officials-hated Rule Book Roger. Not teenage Jim Balsillie: he loved the maverick as much as he loved the game. Neilson's skirmishes mirrored the deep-rooted conflicts with authority that defined Balsillie's teenage years. He was close to his mother and her parents, but he sparred frequently with his father; he was a bright student who alienated teachers with a razor-sharp tongue. Although suspicious of figures of power, Balsillie also aspired to join Canada's business establishment. Balsillie would struggle throughout his career to make peace with his warring two-headed demon: the positive force of ambition versus a deep-rooted distrust of authority.
Predictably, perhaps, Balsillie's trouble with those in charge first became manifest in dealings with his father, Ray Balsillie, a descendent of French Métis, Canadian aboriginals of mixed European and indigenous ancestry that trace their roots to the fur trade. The Balsillies were a complicated bunch. One wing of the family worked at Saskatchewan's fabled Cumberland House, a northern Hudson Bay Company trading post that once housed the ill-fated Franklin expedition to the Arctic-Scottish explorers who perished in the far north in the 1840s. The Balsillie clan shares both Scot and Métis blood. All of which explains Jim Balsillie's piercing blue eyes, sharp cheekbones, and olive skin.
Ray Balsillie whose family moved from Manitoba to a small town south of Waterloo when he was a boy, left the family home as a teenager to make a fresh start in Seaforth, Ontario, with the Royal Canadian Air Force. As an adult Ray Balsillie seldom spoke of his native heritage, and his two sons and daughter were discouraged from raising the subject. It was only when Jim traveled as an adult to Winnipeg that he learned that an aunt was one of that city's most notorious residents. Gladys Balsillie, who died in 1987, began her career as a pilot before opening a popular restaurant and music venue, the Swinging Gate. When the restaurant closed, she made her mark managing exotic dancers at Winnipeg hotels. At her peak, the "Queen of the Strippers" managed more than one hundred male and female performers. Ray may have tried to hide his family's colorful past under the lush blue-green carpet of Ontario cottage country, but there was a strain of restless adventure in Balsillie blood-a history of flesh and fur traders.
Jim was born in 1961 in Seaforth, a small town near Lake Huron. Shortly after, Ray began moving the family around, accepting positions as an electrical repairman with various Ontario companies. Eventually the Balsillies settled in Peterborough, a small, conservative city in the heart of Ontario that, apart from their neighborhood, was straight as an accountant's ruler. When Jim was growing up, Peterborough was a predominantly white, churchgoing community defined by Trent University, a handful of U.S. manufacturing branch plants, and the summer influx of affluent Toronto cottagers. According to Jim, Ray Balsillie viewed himself as an outsider in the upbeat town; he gradually adopted a forlorn, Willy Loman-like air of defeat. "He grappled with insecurities," Balsillie says of his father. He and his dad's relationship "wasn't all hugs and kisses."
As Ray Balsillie withdrew from social activity, devoting his spare time to storing found objects and oddities in the family house, Jim flew in the opposite direction, growing increasingly ambitious. He cut his teeth as a salesman at age seven, selling Christmas cards door-to-door as his mother supervised from the sidewalk. Soon there were multiple paper routes, a painting business, and a job manning the lift at a nearby ski hill.
"I wanted the independence. I wanted nice things. If you wanted books, records, a car, athletic gear, you had to go earn it," he says.
What Balsillie really wanted was to be someone. Upon reading Peter C. Newman's seminal 1975 study of Canada's cozy business aristocracy, The Canadian Establishment, the tradesman's son decided that he had to join the country's most inbred club. Tracing the education and early career paths of powerful corporate chieftains mapped out in Newman's book, Balsillie realized he needed to take three giant steps: first, be accepted by an elite undergraduate school; second, land an accounting job at the establishment firm of Clarkson Gordon; and third, graduate from Harvard Business School. Balsillie had been an indifferent student who, except for his grade 7 home run in math, earned only average marks. He threw himself into studies his final year of high school. Upon being accepted by the University of Toronto's prestigious Trinity College, Balsillie replaced his childhood dreams of professional hockey with a new yearning. "I remember deciding I was going to be the best student in the history of the University of Toronto, set every academic record imaginable, prepare for every assignment, get 100 percent on everything," Balsillie says. "I was pretty sure they were going to put up a statue of me."
* * *
It was deafening, like having your head next to a row of whirring propellers in an airfield. Grade 12 students at W. F. Herman Secondary School, in Windsor, Ontario, were busy in shop class, revving machines under the watchful eye of their electrical shop teacher, John Micsinszki. Students attached wires to motors, generators, instruments, and electrical panels at worktables. A bigger racket came from the back where a closet-sized power supply fed electricity to worktables. Once everything was plugged in, kids measured load factors, testing the efficiency of power coursing through machines.
The roar also tested one's ability to think. Minutes after starting, a confused student crossed wires on a motor, causing a burst of sparks. Micsinszki flew to the back of the shop to shut everything down. In his haste, he forgot students were still running generators at workstations. Within minutes, the machines routed so much electricity back to the idled power supply that it overheated, belching plumes of acrid fire and curdling purple smoke. Now no one could see or hear. Micsinszki shouted for everyone to get out, turned off the motors, and extinguished the fire. When the smoke cleared, he knew he was staring at a financial and physical mess. Unless he figured out how to fix the fried machine, it was going to be impossible to teach electronics.
The solution to the mess arrived minutes later when a tall, broad-shouldered student with a thick hedge of dark hair returned to the shop room. Most kids spying the wreckage of Micsinszki's shop class complained of a sulfurous smell. Not Mike Lazaridis. He went right to the problem, examining the machine's wounded electrical panel. Micsinszki felt that no student at W. F. Herman had a keener grasp of applied science. A polite student with an easy smile, he was always asking permission to reassemble boxes of unwanted equipment donated by local companies. At first Micsinszki insisted Lazaridis study manuals. Soon, though, the prodigy was taking apart and assembling machines, even early, primitive computer systems, on the fly.
"Think you can fix this, Mike?" his teacher asked, nodding to the smoldering mess. After squinting at its wounded organs, Lazaridis offered a confident smile. It took months of tinkering, but Lazaridis eventually succeeded in breathing life back into the charred machine. News of his wizardry spread. Soon teachers were driving Lazaridis to their homes to repair broken TVs and stereos. His most lucrative job came from performing a favor for the school's librarian, who also coached W. F. Herman's Reach for the Top team. In the 1970s, Canadian high schools competed for a chance to shine in a nationally televised academic quiz show hosted by a young, pre-JeopardyAlex Trebek. The key to the contest was connecting agile, well-stocked minds to gunfighter-fast buzzer hands.
W. F. Herman's practice buzzer was always breaking down-ropes of electrical wire came loose from battered hand controls. Lazaridis grew so frustrated with repair requests that he rebuilt the contraption at home, creating a simpler network built around a single thick cable connecting a control console to eight buzzer boxes, each housing a small light and electrical circuit that automatically reset the device for the next answer. Soon other schools were clamoring for the more reliable devices. By the time he graduated from high school, Lazaridis had sold enough buzzers to pay for his first year of university tuition.
It would be too easy to call Mike Lazaridis a born innovator. Better to say he excelled at the family business, which was transformation, new opportunities, and, sometimes, wholesale reinvention. Much of Mike Lazaridis's drive, the airy confidence everyone commented on, was shaped by his family's remarkable history. Born in Istanbul in 1961, Mihal Lazaridis was the first of Nick and Dorothy Lazaridis's two children. Greek transplants in a bustling Turkish city, his parents operated a women's clothing store. Like many Christians in Turkey, they found conditions difficult. Discrimination against non-Muslims was on the rise and the prospect of a compulsory military training program in a Muslim-dominated army promised further hardship. In 1964, the family of three followed Nick's brother, Paul, to Germany, where the siblings began training as tool and die makers. Dorothy Lazaridis earned extra money assembling hats from their small apartment. Four-year-old Mihal kept out of the way by making his own creations. One was a record player made out of Lego blocks, a pin, rubber bands, and a revolving tray. The creation never pulled music from his parents' records, but it did produce enough sound to convince them that their son was unusually skilled.
In 1966, the family followed Nick's brother again, this time to Canada in search of a job in North America's expanding automotive sector. A 1965 bilateral agreement relaxed trade restrictions around auto manufacturing, allowing Detroit automakers to integrate production plants in Canada and the United States. Nearby Windsor was now home to factories producing duty-free car and parts factories for sales in both countries. Nick soon landed a coveted job at a Chrysler assembly plant. Dorothy took part-time jobs as a waitress and seamstress. They saved money, hoping to buy a house and allow Nick to return to his retail roots. When Mihal, now Mike, wanted a sled to negotiate his new homeland's winter, Nick taught his son how to make it out of spare parts.
The Lazaridises' journey instilled in their eldest son an enduring belief that the world was what you make it and Canada was a place where dreams could come true. "It takes a lot of guts to leave behind your country, your family, and my dad's business and move to a whole new country and learn a whole new language," Lazaridis says. "In a sense [my parents] were entrepreneurs; they were explorers. To me, [change] was an opportunity."
When Mike was eight, his family had finally saved enough for a house with a room for him and his baby sister, Cleopatra. The Lazaridises moved into a two-story, postwar brick home in an east-end Windsor neighborhood filled with European and South American immigrants. Mike's interest in science was now a passion. With his father's help, he set up a worktable in a basement room that became known as "Mike's laboratory." One of his first projects was a machine that might quicken the transformation from Mihal to Mike. After failing a spelling test at Ada C. Richards Public School, Lazaridis asked his father to purchase a cassette recorder. With a spelling book in front of him he sat in his lab reading hundreds of words out loud to the machine, pausing after each word before announcing the correct spelling. Night after night he turned the electronic teacher on to test himself. Before long, he was competing in school spelling bees.
Basement quests grew more sophisticated after Lazaridis received a secondhand copy of The Boy Electrician, a chatty how-to guide for understanding and building electrical machines, radios, and other equipment. Lazaridis still cherishes the worn book like an old friend, but his early adventures with The Boy Electrician were frustrating. When he was able to scrape together money for needed parts, he discovered Windsor stores didn't stock items he needed, probably because his guidebook was published in 1914. Rather than discouraging Lazaridis, the setbacks deepened his determination, instilling in him a lifelong attention to thrift. If he could not afford or find materials, he would make them. There was always another way if you were smart and resourceful.
Lazaridis's best friends shared his love of science. Ken Wood's mom was a science teacher who provided ingredients for backyard experiments involving gunpowder, iodine bombs, and handmade rockets. His second pal, Doug Fregin, was a slight, painfully shy boy with thick glasses and a lazy eye who escaped teasing by building model planes. After Wood's family moved, Fregin became Lazaridis's shadow. "They were always together," says Bob Oxford, a longtime school classmate. Although neither science whiz joined other boys in daily games of hockey and football, both were welcomed into the neighborhood.
"They were accepted because everyone liked Mike," Oxford explains.
While Lazaridis read every science book at the local library, Fregin applied model-making skills to soldering circuit boards and wiring equipment. The Boy Electrician projects became more complex. After a neighbor, a ham radio operator, gave them some used equipment, Lazaridis and Fregin hit the big time at a grade 7 science fair. Surrounded by tattered paper volcanoes and wobbly constellations, Lazaridis and Fregin's entry was a solar panel fashioned out of wood, tinfoil, light sensors, and a relay system attached to a small motor. A roaming TV crew showcased the impressive invention on the local news. Celebrity ensued. The school's eighth-grade yearbook featured a caricature of Lazaridis as a mad scientist with thunderbolts bursting from his head.
At W. F. Herman, Lazaridis encountered his first roadblock, a segregated world divided into two castes. The building's second floor was home to the school's elite science, math, and business classes. The first floor was devoted to electrical and machine shops. Second-floor kids went on to university, first-floor grads went to manufacturing jobs. John Micsinszki's wife, Margaret, remembers that her university-educated husband and other tech teachers "had no great love for the guidance department at Herman, where good academic students were discouraged from taking technical courses, even if the student intended to study engineering at university."
All this was initially a challenge for Lazaridis, a kid with a foot on both floors of W. F. Herman. He got around the problem by ignoring boundaries. A devoted math and science student, Lazaridis wasn't about to give up the chance to apply years of basement experiments to well-stocked machine shops. At first he was disappointed with the presumptuous second-floor teachers. "I didn't like the way they looked down at us," he says. Eventually, those instructors realized Lazaridis's electrical prowess had classroom benefits. Students struggling with math turned to Lazaridis, who would explain how complex formulas could be applied to everyday use, such as electricity. In shop, it was "Laz" that the kids turned to for help operating machines. "He basically taught everyone how to use all the equipment. He had a way of explaining it so we understood," Oxford recalls.
The greatest lesson he learned in high school came off-campus. As an electronics teacher and president of a ham radio club, Micsinszki introduced both Lazaridis and Fregin to the world of transistors and cathode-ray tubes. Before long, Lazaridis and Fregin were dropping by the Micsinszki home to talk shop. Margaret Micsinszki, one of the city's first high school computer science teachers, introduced the boys to computing advances. Taking advantage of afterschool tutelage, Lazaridis built his own oscilloscope, Fregin perfected circuit making, and they each built computers. Margaret was convinced that computer science would lead the next wave of modern innovation. Her husband saw a bigger future. "Don't get too seduced by these computers," he warned. "The person who puts wireless communications and computers together is really going to build something special."
Lazaridis never had to write that down. "The day he said that," he says, "it never left us."
* * *
The men's dining hall at Trinity College was in giddy, anarchic chaos. Dinner buns were flying, tables were being thumped, and jeers were rising to the timbered rafters. Solemn chancellors from the century-old University of Toronto college looked on from their oil portraits, as they might have at Hogwarts, as a peculiar ritual unfolded. A first-year student had committed some unpardonable act and was now being "poored out." Lying prone on one of the hall's long trestle tables, holding onto the edge for dear life with the help of a few friends, the young man on trial struggled to stay put as the rest of the dining hall attempted to yank the human centerpiece onto the floor.
"Out, out, out," shouted dozens of jubilant men dressed in floor-length robes. Overseeing this tug-of-war was an older student eyeing his wristwatch. If the boy on trial could hang on for a full minute, he was allowed to leave the dining hall of his own volition. If not, he would be dragged from the room, shamed and ridiculed. The clock ticked, food and shouts filled the air. Then finally ...
"Done!" the student proctor exclaimed, "Balsillie may walk."
As friends cheered, the first-year student stood, breaking into a wide grin as he adjusted his disheveled robe and sauntered out of the wood-paneled hall. Few walked away once targeted in a pooring-out ritual that was as old as the dining hall's wood-paneled walls. Most were pulled from tables or chairs within seconds. The punishment was meant to discourage "poor" behavior by first-year students. At Trinity, where most students descended from political and business bluebloods, stepping out of line usually amounted to breaches of old-world British civility. Poor table manners or boasting could prompt a pooring out. The ritual would fall victim to political correctness in later years, but not soon enough for Balsillie, a frequent target in his first year at Trinity in 1980.
According to former classmates, his offense was, almost always, trying too hard. Shortly after arriving at the castle-like gray stone college to earn a commerce degree, Balsillie was elected president of his year, earned a spot on the school's lacrosse team, and began organizing hockey and football matches. "You always had the impression that he had something to prove," says Andrew Coyne, a Trinity student at the time who went on to be a leading Canadian political columnist with Toronto's National Post.
In his first weeks at university, Balsillie drove himself hard, closeting himself in his dorm room to study, allowing only fifteen-minute breaks every hour to check the score of televised hockey games. When friends dragged him out one night to a frat party, he got home late and in no mood to study for an exam the next day. He aced it anyway and emerged from the experience with a new mantra: "Work hard, party hard."
Few students were as devoted to academic and social success, a relentless all-hours ambition that earned him the nickname "Balls." Balsillie organized theme parties celebrating obscure brews, like Carling Cinci lager, or the films of his favorite character, James Bond. When asked to help organize formal affairs, he displayed a unique talent for stretching a student budget by visiting funeral homes late in the business day in search of free, slightly used flowers to decorate the college's party rooms for formal dinners and dances. His vintage Volkswagen Beetle was often so stuffed with used floral arrangements that he could only see by poking his head through a thicket of ferns. He gamely agreed to grow a beard and perform in a short film about the perils of technology made by fellow Trinity student and future Oscar-nominated filmmaker Atom Egoyan called A Clockwork Trinity.
Balsillie was equally creative about studying. After forging friendships in residence with ambitious students who, like him, arrived from small towns with few connections, he organized a study club so members could share and discuss homework. The group included Malcolm Gladwell, from Elmira, Ontario, who would become the author of several bestsellers, including The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers. Another study-clubber was Nigel Wright, from Ancaster, Ontario, who would go on to become one of Canada's leading financiers and chief of staff to Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
At Trinity, Wright says Balsillie was "a force of nature," juggling multiple challenges with unlimited energy. He threw the best parties, excelled in sports, and ensured homework club members were prepared for exams. Study sessions were usually held in his room and snacks were plentiful. As they swapped notes, members also shared their ambitions. In Balsillie, Wright saw someone who was determined to change a world he believed was stacked against people who shared his working-class background and lack of connections. "His basic position was that he was not going to accept the world as it was. He was determined and dogged about obtaining his objective," Wright says. In those heady days at Trinity, Wright believed Balsillie's ambition would take him to Wall Street or a Fortune 500 company.
Following the career path he had mapped out from Newman's elite business guide, The Canadian Establishment, Balsillie landed a job at the accounting firm Clarkson Gordon after graduating from Trinity. Unlike other ambitious new hires jockeying for positions on big corporate accounting teams, Balsillie opted to join a smaller group that represented entrepreneurial owners of rapidly growing companies. At Clarkson Gordon, Balsillie learned two lessons: first, he did not like accounting; second, new business computing tools were leverage in the hands of an adept junior manager. Balsillie's talent for managing data and financial analysis with early spreadsheet programs got him a seat at takeover tables with senior managers and clients who wanted quick financial breakdowns as negotiations and terms shifted.
"All of a sudden," Balsillie says, "[I was] a rock star, you're in all the partner meetings. They'd say, 'Just bring Jim in.'"
After two years of spreadsheets, Balsillie achieved his final academic objective-acceptance into the masters program at Harvard Business School. By now he was dating Heidi Henschel, a rehab therapist from southern Ontario, who followed him to Boston in 1987. The couple managed Harvard's staggering tuition costs with the help of a fellowship and Balsillie's part-time income from managing a student guidebook and advising for a small financial services firm in Boston. At Harvard, Balsillie found few Canadian small-town peers. Classes were filled with ambitious, privileged students from the United States and other countries-cultured keeners competing for grades that would land them blue-chip business jobs. In his class of ninety MBA students, Balsillie says, "I felt there were eighty-nine Nobel Prize winners and one fraud."
The Canadian outsider learned to overcome his insecurity with humor. The edgy barbs that landed him in boiling water in grade school had morphed into nuanced parodies of professors, many of them aging business chiefs. He became so good at mimicking teachers that classmates captured his act on video. In one he stuffed a pillow up his shirt and waved menthol cigarettes and a can of cream soda as he ummed and ahhed through a lecture. The skewered professor delighted his class in his final lecture by airing Balsillie's parody. "This was huge," Balsillie remembers. "All of a sudden your social cachet goes to the moon."
Just as promising were Balsillie's career choices. He interviewed with a number of prestigious Wall Street firms, including Goldman Sachs, but his master plan took an unexpected turn in his final year when he met a group of business chiefs from the Young Presidents' Organization at a campus cocktail party in early 1989. When Balsillie arrived at the event, one of his classmates steered him to a tall, lean businessman with penetrating blue eyes. A fellow Canadian, Rick Brock warmed immediately to the animated student, inviting his new friend to dinner with a group of other presidents. The young entrepreneurs shared stories, offering frank advice about corporate and personal challenges. Balsillie felt like a business insider for the first time. When it was his turn to talk, Balsillie revealed his humble roots and lofty ambitions.
"I was impressed," says Brock. So impressed, he ordered a limousine and ferried Balsillie to a series of Boston bars. Near the end of the evening, Brock slapped more than a drink on the table. "Why don't you come and learn to run a business?" he asked. The business was Sutherland-Schultz, a midsized electronic equipment maker based near Waterloo, Ontario. Brock could offer only half of what Balsillie could make on Wall Street, but he convinced the student that a senior job at his plant would teach him more about operating a company than he could ever learn as a banker. When Brock woke up the next morning with a screaming headache, he reached for the phone and dialed Balsillie's number. "Remember that offer I gave you last night?" Brock asked. "I was afraid you wouldn't," came a nervous reply.
Balsillie was on his way back to Ontario. His friends were stunned by his career choice. Wall Street was the number one destination of any aspiring finance grad. It was the nerve center of what was then the biggest corporate takeover binge in history. Junk bonds, buyout barbarians, and Michael Milken were such household names that Hollywood named a blockbuster movie Wall Street. Balsillie's Harvard peers had never heard of Waterloo and Canadian friends knew nothing of Sutherland-Schultz. "We were astonished. It didn't seem to fit Jim's game plan," said Wright.
What they failed to grasp was that Balsillie's career vision had shifted: new spreadsheet applications at Clarkson Gordon revealed to him the power of technology. Lining up for job interviews with Fortune 500 companies, he realized he would be competing for years to make his way to the senior ranks. That prospect didn't interest him. Balsillie even sabotaged an interview with influential strategy consultant McKinsey & Company, giving wiseacre answers and accusing an interviewer of asking "stupid" questions. Brock was willing to give him an executive title immediately in a company that was just starting to automate manufacturing systems with computers. "I realized the only way I was going to make it [fast] in this world is by rewriting business rules," Balsillie says, "and technology is an opportunity to rewrite business rules."
* * *
Lazaridis could hardly believe what he was seeing. Standing face pressed against the glass wall of a narrow walkway, he peered down at a cavernous room that looked like a sci-fi movie set. Paneled in lurid red floor and wall tiles, the chamber was jammed with dozens of large, multicolored cabinets, flashing light consoles, and a few studious young men and women operating desktop computers. It was early 1979 and Lazaridis was feasting his eyes on the fabled Red Room at the University of Waterloo. The room housed an IBM 360 Model 75, Canada's largest, fastest computer. The Red Room was a testament to the vision of businessmen and scholars who, in 1957, founded a university in a Mennonite farming community an hour's drive west of Toronto. The need for engineers was so urgent in the postwar boom era that Waterloo founders set up a co-op program that dispatched students each term to semester-long jobs so they could apply their learning in a commercial environment.
The program bridged the academic and corporate divide, allowing for collaboration on such ambitious projects as the Red Room in the 1960s. IBM sold the machine to the University of Waterloo at a discount and the Ontario government subsidized the $3 million acquisition, an item so alien to purchasing categories that the computer was listed as "furnishings." Lazaridis did not see furniture when he visited the computer science department with his parents during his final year of high school. He saw the future. "I just looked down into the room," he recalls, "and I said 'This is where I am going.'"
Wireless technology and computing were traveling toward each other at warp speed when Lazaridis enrolled in electrical engineering at Waterloo. The sprawling computer in the Red Room that so dazzled him in 1979 was unplugged in late 1980 to make way for smaller, more powerful mainframes and the arrival of early desktop computers. These systems were connected through local networks knitted together with cables. Long before e-mail, Lazaridis and classmates were using the university's network to hand in assignments or dispatch messages over the pioneering Arpanet, the U.S. military's Advanced Research Projects Agency Network-the Internet's forerunner. "It was a whole new world. Everything was new," says Lazaridis. "It was like a fantasyland."
Just as he had divided studies at W. F. Herman, Lazaridis explored various disciplines at Waterloo. He supplemented core electrical engineering courses with computer science and physics classes. Of all his studies, it was quantum mechanics that made the greatest impact on him. Classical physics theories were being challenged in the early 1980s. Longstanding formulas that revealed how liquids were heated or why vehicles accelerated downhill had little application in the world of atoms and subatomic particles. One father of the emerging offshoot of classical physics was David Bohm, an American-born physicist whose dabbling in Marxism forced him to leave the country in the McCarthy era. The intuitive scientist continued his work abroad. Borrowing from religious, biological, psychological, and artistic influences, he theorized that atoms and particles were part of a deeper, intricate order in which they were influenced by the properties of other particles. While it would be decades before scientists would be able to apply Bohm's theories to breakthrough experiments in quantum mechanics, the unorthodox thinking encouraged students to explore new frontiers.
"It was a new age," Lazaridis explains. "We had this belief that all sorts of stuff was about to get transformed, from technology to the way we thought about the universe." Bohm's theories were so influential that when Lazaridis learned the scientist would be speaking in Ottawa in May 1983, he and a group of friends approached the pending visit like religious pilgrims. "We all wanted to go to Ottawa. We had no money. A couple of us said we can do this, it didn't need to be impossible," Lazaridis says.
The Waterloo students eventually made their way to Ottawa. Listening to the lecture, Lazaridis felt that he was in the presence of an "enlightened" man who "crackled" with confidence. He also remembers the small miracles that made his trip possible. A professor let the students drive a university van to the speech and friends secured rooms at an Ottawa fraternity. "The point was, we never gave up," he now says. "We just believed we had to get there and see David Bohm." Lazaridis would approach future challenges with the same sense of destiny.
At the University of Waterloo, Lazaridis distinguished himself as an entrepreneur. He landed a plum work placement at the Canadian branch of the Minneapolis supercomputer maker Control Data Corporation. He then earned his way out of a tedious night shift running computer diagnostics by designing a program that automated the process. Lazaridis was given a series of increasingly important assignments working with Control Data's "big iron" computers and was on track for a job in Minneapolis. The plans, however, were derailed by the company's financial woes. The big computer maker responded ineptly to the arrival of microcomputers and spent most of the 1980s and 1990s shedding assets. It is now called Ceridian.
The wrenching decline of a company staffed by so many smart and devoted engineers made a big impression on Lazaridis. Innovation could not thrive without corporate support and effective commercial strategies. Discouraged with the world of big business, he decided to be his own boss by starting a consulting company that designed computer solutions for local technology companies. For one of his first clients, he built a primitive memory card with custom software that eliminated the need for cumbersome floppy disks. He became so busy with his fledgling company that the university agreed to let him work for himself for his third-year co-op job placement. The $5,000 in profits he pocketed during the term allowed him to buy a new computer and take his father, Nick, on a fishing trip.
Lazaridis loved running his own business. By the fourth year he was consumed with an innovation that he and Doug Fregin had toyed with in Micsinszki's basement. By hooking up an early computer to a cathode-ray tube, the pair could transmit data to project information on a television screen. The device was a money saver for Micsinszki, who burned through expensive tubes broadcasting the recorded times and frequencies of his regular one-man ham radio talk show for fellow enthusiasts. At Waterloo, Lazaridis saw a grander application for the technology, and Fregin, who visited him frequently on breaks from his studies at the University of Windsor, shared his enthusiasm. During these get-togethers the old friends honed their high school innovation, creating a device with a custom-designed circuit board, computer memory, power supply, central processor, and a calculator-sized keyboard. Once wired into a cathode-ray tube, the system enabled users to type words that flashed onto television screens.
The system, Lazaridis decided, would be called Budgie, a fun, consumer-friendly name that he believed would endear people to an electronic system that was difficult to explain or understand. By spring of 1984 he was so convinced the device represented a breakthrough that he traveled home to Windsor to tell his parents and the Micsinszkis that he and Fregin would be dropping out of university weeks before graduation to launch a new business. Margaret Micsinszki said she and her husband were shocked by his decision, but they had learned to trust Lazaridis's determination. For Lazaridis, she says, "There were no roadblocks. He would persist until the experiment succeeded or the project worked."
While Fregin and University of Waterloo co-op student Chris Shaw wrote software code and perfected hardware for the Budgie, Lazaridis pitched the innovation to local businesses as a kind of digital advertising banner that could effortlessly flash new messages. When a local hardware store and shopping mall agreed to test the Budgie, the trio attracted local media attention. A black-and-white photograph taken by a local newspaper of the young entrepreneurs, still very much Boy Electricians, remains a timeless portrait of innovators who misunderstood their market.
At the center of the photograph is a glass case with two televisions. One reads, "Advertise On Me - I Attract Customers," the other, "The Budgie System." Perched on top of the second TV set is a stuffed bird. To the left of the display, Shaw and Fregin join together, unsmiling, clad in plaid (Fregin) and a rumpled T-shirt (Shaw). To the right stands Lazaridis, at twenty-three sporting premature gray hairs, wearing an oxford shirt, V-neck sweater, and khaki plants. Clutching a vinyl briefcase and staring confidently into the camera, Lazaridis appears oblivious to a group of female shoppers gathered behind him. No one notices that the stand-in budgie is actually a toy parrot. Instead they are sifting through a large box of discounted goods placed in the hall by a nearby retailer.
In an unintended nod to the many lessons they had yet to learn about running a business, Lazaridis and Fregin formally registered their new company under the name Research In Motion Ltd. on March 7, 1984.
Copyright © 2015 by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff