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Roger L. Martin, the author of the book hawked in this article, is also a director at RIM. Maximizing shareholder value indeed!

That said, Roger is correct (incidentally or not) in my book to criticize the short-term casino nature of the public equity market buyers and sellers. Too often they forget that as shareholders of a stock they are part-owners in the enterprise; rather they only desire to see the price tag on their stock certificate go up in the next minute so they can sell for a profit. That kind of thinking can poison a company.

The lesson I draw from this is that it matters who your investors are. Once you've sold part of the company, you must take into account the desires of your new partners, even if they are a teeming mass of the investing public. After all, you make the choice of whom you sell to. Some corporate leaders attempt to 'manage' their way out of this by massaging earnings the way Jack Welch did. I personally think the best way to handle this is by open education. Warren Buffett writes an elegant and informative letter each year and answers questions alongside Charlie Munger for four or five hours straight at the Berkshire meeting. If your business is too volatile, too secretive, or too sensitive to be explained to the public, you probably shouldn't be doing an IPO in the first place.

It occurs to me that Roger's best hope is to change the minds of RIM shareholders declaring open season on the board. It is naive of Roger Martin to think that his book and Denning's sensationalist hawking of it will do anything to soften the ire of RIM's shareholders. By the same token, it was naive of RIM's leaders not to take into account the fact that once they sold shares to the public, it became the public's company.