BlackBerry Limited (BB)

[XenaLives]

Interesting 2014 article:

John Chen started his career like a lot of young engineers do: working the dreaded "third shift." Fresh out of college, Chen found himself on the floor of a mainframe computer assembly facility in southern California from 10 p.m. until 6 a.m., debugging machines and fixing manufacturing problems. In the dead of night, while the engineers and designers slept, "you were basically left alone with millions of lines of code, and schematics coming out everywhere," he tells Report on Business magazine during a series of exclusive interviews in late January and February. "It forced me to go through it the brute force way. You learn everything line by line, wire by wire."

Thirty-five years later, Chen is back on a third shift of a different sort, as the new chief executive officer of BlackBerry Ltd., following long-time co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie and their short-lived successor, Thorsten Heins. Chen sees a lot of parallels between his first job and his latest. "This is like the third shift, sitting there, by myself…and trying to figure out where the problem is," says Chen, who was swept in last November when Fairfax Financial Holdings Ltd. abandoned its takeover of the company and instead led a $1.25-billion refinancing (all currency in U.S. dollars). "It could be devastating—you could be wrong. You could be working on a problem in circles and looking at the wrong places. But it could be really cool too."

When Chen joined BlackBerry, it was bleeding customers, employees, revenue, cash and share value. An all-in bet on a new operating system called BlackBerry 10 had failed, prompting BlackBerry to put itself up for sale. The company formerly known as Research In Motion, which had pioneered the $350-billion-plus smartphone industry, seemed destined to disappear.

Chen, by nature, is drawn to a puzzle few believed could be solved: finding a sustainable path forward for the iconic Canadian company as the BlackBerry smartphone—the signature product around which the whole company was built—continues to lose market share and sink further into irrelevance.

continued.....

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-magazine/john-chens-simple-plan-to-save-blackberry/article17065516/?page=all