Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Blackberry

Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of Blackberry is the riveting story of  how BlackBerry engineered a spectacular technological upset of the twenty-first century. The company lost its way leading to the breakdown  of one of the most successful partnerships in the history of Canadian  business. The book sheds light on relationship between RIM’s founders, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie, as the company evolved.

McNish and Silcoff offer an inside account of a notorious crash of  RIM’s network system at a critical juncture in its then-troubled  performance. Losing the Signal engagingly and thoroughly covers the rise of Research in Motion, and a transformative technology that changed the way people everywhere communicate with one another.

“There are many insights for Canadian business in this year’s winning book, Losing the Signal,”  says Tahir Ayub, Managing Partner, Markets and Industries at PwC Canada. “Many of the challenges that make up the narrative of the book including early-stage financing, the stress of rapid growth, the imperative for high standards of corporate governance and the discipline  of professional management are common in companies looking to set themselves on a path for growth.”

Jacquie McNish is Senior Correspondent with The Wall Street Journal and was a senior writer with The Globe and Mail.  She has won seven National Newspaper Awards for her ground-breaking investigations into some of the biggest business stories of the past three decades. This is McNish’s third National Business Book Award.  Previously she co-authored Wrong Way: The Fall of Conrad Black with Sinclair Stewart and The Third Rail: Confronting Our Pension Failures with Jim Leech.

Sean Silcoff is a business writer with The Globe and Mail. He led the Globe’s coverage of the rise and fall of BlackBerry and has written extensively on many major Canadian business stories of the past two decades. Sean is a two-time winner of the National Newspaper Award, the Montreal  Economic Institute Economic Education Prize and the Hon. Edward Goff Penny Memorial Prize for Young Canadian Journalists.

The 2016 finalists included:

John Stackhouse, Mass Disruption: Thirty Years on the Front Lines of a Media Revolution, published by Random House Canada.

William Watson, The Inequality Trap: Fighting Capitalism Instead of Poverty, published by The University of Toronto Press.