RIM investors say reprieve on leadership temporary

RIM in the aftermath of its shareholder meeting was told that its deal to drop a leadership challenge was just temporary. Northwest & Ethical, which had put forward a motion to force a split between the board chairman and CEO roles, said the BlackBerry maker had six months to prove that Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis had a need to lead both the board and the overall company at the same time. If the voluntary, independent committee can't reach a conclusion by January 31, 2012, the proposal would come back.

The Canadian company maintains that its independent director John Richardson handles the equivalent to the chairman position at a regular company and keeps the board honest. Critics, however, have said that Balsillie and Lazaridis can still have excessive control of board votes and the implication that board votes could be dismissed out of hand.

Many of the attacks on RIM's declining market share have pinned it on a lack of clear direction owing to the top-heavy management as well as a slow-moving structure that discourages challenges to policies and executive decisions. Anonymous staffers have regularly accused RIM of dismissing the iPhone as a threat and moving too slowly once the danger of Apple, and later Google's Android, were evident.

Balsillie and Lazaridis were relatively safe at the shareholder meeting, where they were voted back in with a wide margin and faced little actual criticism of their moves. The company may face a reckoning with the independent committee's verdict, though, since any resistance to proposed changes could spur calls not just to split the chairman and CEO roles but to target the CEOs themselves. [via Bloomberg]

By Electronista Staff