Thorsten Heins, RIM CEO, nominated for TSX Tech Exec of the Year
Ask any CEO about his company’s most valuable asset, and he will, without fail, respond by telling you it is the employees of said concern.
Is this just a platitude, or does it actually mean something? At the junior level, where companies might employ ten to fifty people, a charismatic CEO can indeed carry the mail.
But spread a deficiency in people power across two, three, or ten-thousand employees and its easy to see why cultivating and acknowledging a loyal and engaged staff can represent the difference between winning and losing business.
The experiences of the three nominees for Cantech Letter TSX Tech Exec of the Year couldn’t be more different. But each this year has tipped his hat to those on the organisational chart beneath him, and will without doubt share the award with them if voted by you as winner.
Here are the nominees, as chosen by the judges. They are listed in alphabetical order, by last name. You can vote for your choice in the poll at the bottom of the page.
Michael Donovan, DHX Media (TSX:DHX)
This was the year CEO Michael Donovan transformed the Halifax-based company’s vision from promise to practice.
The punctuation mark on Donovan’s year at the helm was the approximately $111 million acquisition of Toronto-based Cookie Jar Entertainment, a deal that would add $56.7-million to DHX’s topline. Along the way, DHX Became the largest supplier of children’s entertainment to Netflix.
Thorsten Heins, Research in Motion (TSX:RIM)
For the first ten months of Thorsten Heins tenure, he endured more doubt and scrutiny and outright ridicule than any new CEO should have to suffer. Regardless, Heins plodded on as the delay of RIM’s new BlackBerry 10 platform seemed to stretch to an eternity. But now, with BlackBerry 10 a little more than a month away, critics seem to be understanding that Heins is no shrinking violet.
Many analysts have recently reconsidered RIM’s prospects, and decided that the worst case scenario and the most likely scenario are further apart than they first thought.
Cormark analyst Richard Tse says RIM’s platform transition remains an uphill battle, but RIM’s “surprising operational progress” has given it wiggle room between BlackBerry 7 and BlackBerry 10 that many critics didn’t think the company could spare.
Michael Roach, CGI Group (TSX:GIB.A)
At CGI Group’s annual general meeting a couple years ago, CEO Michael Roach was grilled repeatedly by shareholders on the subject of the company declaring a dividend. Roach explained why it was not in the cards for the company. “Personally, I would fare very well from a dividend,” he said. “I kiddingly say, ‘My wife would love a dividend,”.
Vote for Thorsten
Anybody who knows anything about Research and Motion knows the exceptional job that Thorsten Heins has done in such a short time – and even before the launch of BlackBerry 10, the turnaround is well in progress.
We urge all of #TeamBlackBerry to vote for Thorsten here.
