BlackBerry ousts COO and CMO, replaces CFO
The high-level shakeups aren't over at BlackBerry just because the company has a new CEO. The company has just let go of Chief Operating Officer Kristian Tear (pictured at left) and Chief Marketing Officer Frank Boulben (right), both of whom had assumed their roles roughly one year ago.
Context & Ripple Effects
Kristian Tear and Frank Boulben arrived only eighteen months ago, when RIM named them COO and CMO as part of the global restructuring it was then preparing; their removal now, alongside a replaced CFO, means the operating team built for that earlier reset is itself being dismantled. The move lands weeks after BlackBerry launched the Porsche-designed Z10 into roughly $1 billion in losses and shipped the Z30 as a US exclusive on Verizon.
The shakeup also extends a year of contraction beneath the C-suite: in July 2013 BlackBerry already cut 250 employees from its new product testing and R&D department. With a new CEO installed above empty COO, CMO, and CFO chairs, the syndicated pickup across eight outlets reflects how closely the market is watching whether this board is rebuilding management or liquidating the previous management's strategy.
First-order effects
- BlackBerry must fill three C-suite seats at once — COO, CMO, and CFO — while its device lineup (Z10, Z30) is mid-cycle at carriers like Verizon, leaving no named executive owning operations or marketing.
- The executives who designed and sold the BB10-era push, including the Z10 launch, are removed within months of that phone contributing to roughly $1 billion in losses.
Second-order effects
- Carrier and enterprise partners weighing Z30 commitments face a leadership vacuum atop both go-to-market and finance, raising the perceived risk of continuing shelf space and contracts with a company whose product owners keep turning over.
- Any successor CMO inherits a brand position defined by two failed premium launches, effectively forcing a repricing or repositioning decision that the ousted team had owned since May 2012.
Third-order effects
- If each new leadership layer keeps erasing its predecessor's strategy — hires made for the 2012 restructuring gone inside eighteen months — BlackBerry's device business risks becoming unsellable on execution continuity alone, pushing the company's center of gravity toward whatever business lines survive management churn.
- For the wider handset industry, the episode reinforces that boards of distressed smartphone makers now treat wholesale C-suite replacement as the standard first response to a flagship failure, ahead of any product pivot.
The trend: BlackBerry's revolving C-suite is one data point in the distressed-smartphone-maker pattern where leadership turnover now runs faster than product cycles, with each new CEO dismantling the prior regime's team.