RIM Names Kristian Tear COO, Frank Boulben CMO
Research In Motion this morning announced two addition to its management team. — The company named Kristian Tear as chief operating officer. Tear has been with Sony Mobile Communications, where he served as executive VP.
Context & Ripple Effects
The appointments complete a leadership teardown that began with the January decision to strip the co-CEO structure, then accelerated when the March Q4 miss took out the COO and CTO alongside Jim Balsillie's board resignation. RIM has spent those weeks naming outsiders, not promoting from within, while separately cutting senior staff.
The COO seat goes to Kristian Tear, an executive VP poached from Sony Mobile Communications — a direct hire from one of the handset rivals RIM is fighting. The CMO role had been effectively open since the marketing chief walked out on the eve of the PlayBook launch in 2011; Frank Boulben now inherits a brand position that year of churn left unattended. The pickup breadth — CNET, AllThingsD, ZDNet, The Verge, Engadget among others running it same-day — reflects how much weight observers put on each seat RIM fills.
First-order effects
- Tear steps into the operating role vacated in the March shake-up, arriving from Sony Mobile with carrier and device experience but no BlackBerry institutional memory — the new CEO is building his own bench rather than keeping founders' lieutenants.
- Boulben takes over marketing at the point where the PlayBook stumble and the 2011 CMO exit have left RIM without a sustained consumer message through its most critical product cycle.
Second-order effects
- Hiring an operations chief from Sony Mobile signals that struggling handset makers are now trading executives directly — RIM's recovery plan is being staffed from competitors' ranks, and Sony Mobile loses a senior operator mid-turnaround.
- Each new hire raises expectations that the remaining founder-era structure will be replaced wholesale; investors reading the March layoffs alongside these appointments see a company assembling a team built for cost discipline first.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, RIM's governance model inverts: a single new CEO importing peer-company operators to execute a turnaround, displacing the founder-built dual-leadership culture — a template other legacy device makers under shareholder pressure may copy.
- The durability of these appointments becomes the test of whether outside-hired turnarounds at hardware firms survive contact with product cycles, or whether the seats churn again before any strategy lands.
The trend: Legacy handset makers in distress are rebuilding leadership by importing executives from direct rivals, trading institutional continuity for turnaround credibility.