Research in Motion (RIM), maker of the ubiquitous BlackBerry, is one company that takes great pains to signal its distance from the shareholder value principle. Back in 1997, just after the firm’s IPO, the founders made a rule that any manager who talked about the share price at work had to buy a doughnut for every person in the company. Early infractions were not terribly painful for the culprit, but as the company grew, that changed. In 2001, the chief operating officer mentioned RIM’s surging stock price in the wake of a call with analysts and was saddled with the task of delivering more than 800 doughnuts to the next weekly meeting of employees. He even had to make special arrangements with local doughnut shops to get enough. That incident apparently seared the doughnut rule into the neurons of managers at RIM, which hasn’t recorded an infraction since then.
Source: The Age of Customer Capitalism
Original Publication: Harvard Business Review
Subject: Organizational Behavior
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