Jacquie McNish
Jacquie McNish was born in Peterborough, Ontario, shortly after which she moved with her family through a series of leafy suburbs in the United States and Canada. She has spent her professional career in Toronto and New York with The Wall Street Journal and the Globe and Mail. She is the author or co-author of four books, the latest of which is: Losing The Signal, The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry. When not in the attic writing she likes to cycle along Lake Ontario.
3 Books Written
Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry
by Jacquie McNish
Rating: 4.0 ⭐
• 6 recommendations ❤️
In 2009, BlackBerry controlled half of the smartphone market. Today that number is less than one percent. What went so wrong?Losing the Signal is a riveting story of a company that toppled global giants before succumbing to the ruthlessly competitive forces of Silicon Valley. This is not a conventional tale of modern business failure by fraud and greed; instead, the rise and fall of BlackBerry reveals the dangerous speed at which innovators race along the information superhighway.With unprecedented access to key players, senior executives, directors, and competitors, Losing the Signal unveils the remarkable rise of a company that started above a bagel store in a small Canadian city and went on to briefly control one half of the smartphone market. At the heart of the story is an unlikely partnership between a visionary engineer, Mike Lazaridis, and an aggressive Harvard Business School grad, Jim Balsillie. Together, they engineered a pioneering pocket e-mail device that became the tool of choice for CEOs and world leaders. The partnership enjoyed only a brief moment on top of the world, however. At the very moment BlackBerry was ranked the world's fastest-growing company, internal feuds and chaotic growth crippled the company as it faced its gravest test: Apple and Google's entry into the mobile phone market.Expertly told by acclaimed journalists Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, this is an entertaining, whirlwind narrative that goes behind the scenes to reveal one of the most compelling business stories of the new century.
From the windswept Labrador coast, where the massive nickel deposit was discovered, to the boardrooms of Singapore, Toronto, and Vancouver where the giant poker game for Diamond Fields was played out, the story behind Voisey's Bay has enormous economic significance for Canada and international financial markets.One of the most intriguing elements was the takeover battle for Diamond Fields that pitted the conservative management team at the world's largest nickel company, Inco Ltd., against free-wheeling stock promoter Robert Friedland.Also playing key roles in the race for Voisey's Bay were managers from the Bronfman-controlled Edper group, prominent Wall Street and Bay Street investment houses, and leading mutual funds.
Tautly written and fast-paced, Wrong Way chronicles the excesses of a larger-than-life entrepreneur whose autocratic temperament and management style would prove to be his undoing. It is a testament to the rise of shareholder activism and a cautionary tale of corporate cronyism at its worst.