When he knows he's on to something, his small blue eyes light up behind Benjamin Franklin-esque bifocals. The founder and co-CEO of Research In Motion is trying to explain the importance of pure research in the realm of theoretical physics and, sensing that the subject matter is difficult to grasp, Mike Lazaridis, eyes alight, launches into a one-man skit starring none other than Albert Einstein.
"Let's go back to 1905," he says, "a record year for Einstein." That was Annus Mirabilis for the physicist, who published four major papers detailing, among other things, his theories on special relativity and the particulate nature of light. "Here's a guy going into the grants department"—and here Lazaridis drops into a German accent. "I vish to have a small stipend to pay for my blackboard, my house, a supply of tobacco for my pipe and for a few trips I'd like to make and the letters that I send."
"Um, why?"
"Because I have this idea that light is an absolute speed limit and that it's made up of these little corpuscles that I call quanta."
"They're gonna go, 'What is this guy talking about? So how is this going to help with horse production?'" Lazaridis bangs the table with his left hand. "It's 1905. What is the current imperative? Horses! We needed horses. We were trying to figure out how to make more stagecoaches! Think about it!" He pauses.
"Quanta, that breakthrough that Einstein got the Nobel Prize for, that's semiconductors, that's lasers, that's fibre optics, that's everything," he says. "Relativity theory—GPS wouldn't work without that," he says. His lesson concluded, Lazaridis sits back in his seat and spreads his hands as if to say, "Think about that."
It's not the kind of impassioned speech you'd expect from the co-CEO of one of Canada's biggest companies. Even compared to his notoriously media-wary counterpart, Jim Balsillie, Lazaridis is known as "the quiet one." He'd much prefer sitting down for Q&A with an irreverent science journal like New Scientist than with a business magazine. In his mind, he's the guy behind the scenes, the guy whose singular mission is to make sure RIM keeps pumping out more of its highly addictive BlackBerrys (as the magazine went to press, rumour had it that the company would soon release a touchscreen version to go up against Apple's iPhone).
Mike Lazaridis at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario.
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So, outbursts, especially in front of journalists, are rare. It's just that the pervasiveness of short-term thinking—worrying about building better stagecoaches instead of dreaming up satellites, or pandering to earnings-obsessed analysts rather than laying the groundwork for future innovations—gets him fired up. Lazaridis, more than anyone else, knows that nothing he has achieved in the past 25 years—certainly not the invention of a handheld e-mail device such as the BlackBerry—would have been possible without the pioneering work of theoretical physicists like Einstein.
That's why he's here at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, a haven for some of the world's top minds in scientific research and a place that may well harbour the next Einstein. It's noon, and the blackboard-lined hallways are eerily quiet (most of the staff and students are nocturnal by nature). Lazaridis is seated in one of the few enclosed corners of the open-concept building. Down the hall, in the Black Hole Bistro, a tableful of young physicists are discussing matters of light, energy and atoms over bowls of onion-and-pear soup. Most of the lounges show no signs of life, save for the alien scratchings of the world's hardest math problems on the blackboards. In the Mike Lazaridis Theatre of Ideas one floor down, the muted applause following a presentation can just barely be heard. Lazaridis, in his blue shirt and tie, is smiling. His snow-white hair is, as always, combed into an immaculate wave.
Whenever he can, Lazaridis likes to roam the halls and talk with the math whizzes who work here—guys like Rob Myers, one of the nation's foremost experts in string theory, and Lucien Hardy, whose contributions to quantum teleportation are known around the world. Lazaridis is not looking to glean any scientific tidbits to take back to his headquarters—most of the pure research going on here will never lead to any practical commercial applications. "He wants to see the activity," says Myers, the institute's interim scientific director. "He's a fan of science and excited by it."
That's one reason why, in 1999, Lazaridis donated $100 million of his nascent fortune to seed the institute. Another, he says, is "because people take theoretical physics for granted." No kidding. This world of equations and chalk dust is about as far away as you can get from the world of commerce. Why anyone would hand over such a massive amount of money—at the time, close to one-fifth of Lazaridis's net worth—to a collection of wild-haired math freaks is lost on most of the folks on Bay Street. Sure, Lazaridis knows that quarterly earnings are important. (In its most recent quarter, RIM posted a higher-than-expected profit of $412.5 million and shipped 2.2 million new BlackBerrys, the first time in the company's history that it broke through the two-million-mark in a quarter.) But he also knows that without the kind of work being done at Perimeter, chances are slim that someone will develop another world-beating technology like RIM's 60 or 80 years down the line.
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