A Blackberry sign is seen in front of their offices on the day of their annual general meeting for shareholders in Waterloo, Canada June 23, 2015.© Mark Blinch / Reuters
A book chronicling the behind-the-scenes successes and stumbles of BlackBerry, written by two Globe and Mail reporters, has been shortlisted for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award.
Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry, by Jacquie McNish and Sean Silcoff, is one of six books chosen from a list of 15 to contend for the £30,000 ($61,277) prize.
The book has been a bestseller in Canada, and traces the inside story of entrepreneurs Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis, who built a Waterloo, Ont., startup into a global powerhouse that reshaped wireless communications and created legions of "crackberry" addicts, only to lose the smartphone market to rivals such as Apple Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd.
Other titles also in the hunt, continuing a theme of technologies that change society, include a look at automation's impact on employment, Martin Ford's The Rise of the Robots; Nathaniel Popper's Digital Gold, which tracks the rise of bitcoin and digital currency; and How Music Got Free, by Stephen Witt. Anne-Marie Slaughter's Unfinished Business, which looks at how we balance work and family, and Richard Thaler's history of behavioural economics, Misbehaving, round out this year's finalists.
A panel of judges, including FT editor Lionel Barber, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and economist and author Dambisa Moyo, will chose the winner, to be named Nov. 17 in New York. Each runner-up receives £10,000 ($20,427).
James Bradshaw