According to the announcement, Heins was recommended to the board by Lazaridis and Balsillie as part of a succession plan that they proposed to the board. The board voted unanimously to accept the plan and appoint Heins. As part of the succession Balsillie remains a member of RIM’s board of directors and a major shareholder. He expressed his enthusiasm at the change of leadership and said that Heins and the current management team “will have my full support.”

Lazaridis will become the Vice Chair of RIM’s board of directors, and chair of the board’s new Innovation Committee. Lazaridis also expressed enthusiasm at the move, saying that he felt Heins had shown “the right mix of leadership, relevant industry experience and skills to take the company forward.” He is so confident, in fact, that he also stated his plans to purchase another $50 million in RIM stock.

Following a 23-year tenure at Siemens Communications Heins, a native of Germany, went to work at RIM in 2007 as Senior Vice President for Hardware Engineering. In 2011 he became Chief Operating Officer for Product and Sales.

As part of the announcement, RIM posted a series of videos featuring Heins talking about RIM. Here are some of them:

Times have been hard for RIM lately. The company has been steadily losing market share to Android and iOS devices, and a string of underperforming products and poor business decisions have taken the situation from bad to worse. There have even been rumors that the company was looking to sell. While Heins’s appointment argues against such a sale, the fact remains that RIM remains in a tough spot. It will be interesting to see whether a new CEO can right RIM’s troubled ship. While the company seems enthusiastic about the change, reactions on Twitter and elsewhere were somewhat cooler:

What do you think? Will a new CEO be able to get RIM back on track? Sound off in the comments.

Speaking on the appointment, Roy Bostock, Chairman of Yahoo’s board of directors, said, “Scott brings to Yahoo! a proven record of building on a solid foundation of existing assets and resources to reignite innovation and drive growth, precisely the formula we need at Yahoo!”

This appointment comes almost four months to the day after the announcement that Yahoo had fired CEO Carol Bartz. Bartz was apparently fired over the phone by Bostock. Bartz had been hired in 2009 to help dig the struggling company out of its troubles, a task at which she was largely unsuccessful. Yahoo has been stepping up efforts to find a replacement in recent weeks. In the interim, the company has been headed by CFO Tim Morse.

Meanwhile, eBay has announced that eBay CEO John Donahoe will take the reins of PayPal until a new president can be appointed.

[Source: Yahoo Press Release]

Opening on Tuesday, HP’s stock took a hit and is currently trading at $40.72/share. A $0.75 decrease from yesterday. This can be attributed to talks of “new directions” and “long-term strategy“, as such terms can lessen the confidence of investors.

Apotheker mentioned cloud services as a market HP plans to invest heavily in moving forward. He even promised to deliver a cloud infrastructure in 2011. Services HP will offer include an app store, along with other programs for enterprises.

To coincide with their cloud services, HP will move forward with their expansive plans for WebOS. Last year, HP purchased Palm and looked to their WebOS platform as an investment opportunity. Last month, HP laid out their list of devices which will utilize WebOS: HP TouchPad, Veer and Pre3. Of their plans for the mobile space, Apotheker believes there could be 100 million devices a year running the WebOS platform.

Bill Shope, an analyst at Goldman Sachs, had mixed feelings towards the CEO’s plans, “We were impressed with the new CEO’s long-term vision, and agree with his view on the areas where HP needs to focus in coming years” he continues, “Nevertheless, we still believe the company is underestimating the costs of its current transformation and the resulting risks to medium-term margin stability.”

The obvious problems ahead for HP come from staunch competition they’ll be facing in the new markets they plan to dive into. On the cloud side of things, Oracle and Cisco are established companies with renowned products. Their mobile plans will be going up against the two-headed monster of Android, and iOS.

While HP has a tough journey ahead, sometimes it’s bold words and plans that are needed to come up from a rut. Ever since the abrupt exit of ex-CEO, Mark Hurd, the company has been sliding backwards. Their stock has been down 20% the past year.

Apotheker has laid out the plan, now it’s time to see how HP handles the follow through.

This week, I was speaking with a client who wanted to be able to go on vacation with the knowledge that his business was still moving in the right direction. He wanted to be able to go away and be away without checking in (and stressing out) throughout the day. That conversation inspired this post.

As a small business owner or self-employed professional, you place a high value on your time. It’s easy to get caught up in reinventing the wheel over and over again. As you grow and bring on help (a virtual assistant, customer service, etc.) it can be hard to let go and feel confident that your business is moving in the right direction without you being in the office and following up on every detail yourself.

In order to work less, get more done and make sure your staff is doing things they way you want them to be done, you need to create systems.

Business systems are really powerful. They can help you:

-          Manage growth

-          Delegate

-          Bring on assistance

-          Focus on the big picture while still knowing the day-to-day tasks are being handled in the manner in which you WANT them to be handled

-          Standardize your processes

-          Be assured your clients will have a solid and consistent experience with your company

-          Provide for top-notch client service

-          Stop reinventing the wheel

I always recommend my clients create an Operations Manual. In it you will list all the tasks that must be done in your business with step-by-step directions for each task. It should be regularly updated.

The goal of your Operations Manual is to allow anyone to walk into your business and quickly get up to speed. It allows you, the business owner, to know your business is moving forward in the direction YOU want, even when you are not there. Plus, it gives you direction for processes you do over and over but which aren’t part of your daily routine.

Your Operations Manual should be easy to read, use simple language and have practical information. It’s a good idea to have an easy-to-use table of contents.

There are many software options for your operations manual. You can use something as simple as Microsoft Word, although there are many “fancier” options out there. Another route to take would be to use a web-based collaborative tool such as Google Docs or SharePoint so everyone on your team/staff can update the document.

Since your Operations Manual is a living, breathing document, it’s important that you put a quarterly review of it on your calendar. 

The latest attempt to move to the next level, according to TechCrunch, is the hiring of Feedburner co-founder and CEO Dick Costolo as the new COO of Twitter. Costolo left Google in July after spending enough time with Feedburner’s new owners to watch them drop the ball. What makes this hire significant (aside from Costolo being an early investor in Twitter) according to TC’s Michael Arrington is

Costolo, who is also an early Twitter investor, is someone who has actual experience building scalable infrastructures, which Twitter sorely needs. The company hasn’t launched any new features in recent memory, and continues to have regular downtime. In fact, Twitter’s inability to build features and keep the service live is a serious competitive disadvantage. Costolo can presumably fix all that.

So here we are living out another day in the never ending soap opera of hope and flame-outs that is Twitter. From the confusion of “How does thing work for business?” to the predictions that the service is woefully undervalued and underhyped and all stops in between, everyone wants in on the Twitter phenomenon. Fortunately, it looks like Twitter is taking notice as well by hiring the likes of Costolo. They recently hired Google’s top legal ace as well.

So Twitter is still busy in the background trying to get the right people on the bus. Stay tuned as something is likely to change or be predicted in the next 15 seconds or so that will keep everyone busy for another short period of time.

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The Wall Street Journal reports some of the information that has been given out during the AOL / Armstrong Summer Tour ’09. Interviews appear in Ad Age and paidContnet.org and tell the tale of the new AOL. The AOL that is being sent into its own orbit from Time Warner and the AOL that is determined to get over its past to look forward to its future. While all of the talk is nice, it remains to be seen just whether or not AOL can get anywhere near where it was during the go-go days when it actually set the pace rather than breathing in others’ exhaust fumes like they do now.

The details or even the specific business areas that are being focused on, are not nearly as important to turning things around at AOL as the company’s morale is.

One of the first items on the to-do list for Mr. Armstrong, a 38-year-old former Google ad-sales executive who joined AOL in April, is to revive morale. The company’s base of about 7,000 employees is less than half its peak during the dot-com boom.

Mr. Armstrong spent the first 100 days of his tenure hosting meetings with more than 6,000 employees at AOL offices in 16 cities across the globe, from Bangalore, India, to Denver. Last week, he played in a baseball game with other AOL employees against pop stars the Jonas Brothers at the company’s Dulles, Va., campus. Mr. Armstrong says he also used his tour to survey the company’s operations and determine strategy.

The culture at AOL has taken a significant beating during its fall from grace. While it was not revealed just how many of the remaining employees have been at the company for an extended period that kind of upheaval takes a toll. It is a toll that will take more than just a strong first 100 days to get past. Have you ever been at a company when the new guard is brought in? Even if you have the most dynamic person in the world coming in (like an Armstrong) there will be a significant number of people who will be hearing the Who singing “Meet the new boss, it’s the same as the old boss!”. That takes time to either surgically remove or radically reshape.

All of this change is taking place during one of the worst downturns of recent memory as well, so Armstrong certainly has his work cut out for him. Rather than me listing what the company is focusing on what would you, the potential user / customer of a new AOL want to see? What would entice you to consider AOL a viable alternative again in the new world order of Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest? Do they have a chance?

Have a great rest of your Monday.

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LinkedIn has now announced the move of making president, Jeff Weiner, the new CEO of the company. Weiner came over from Yahoo in January and this move is not raising any eyebrows. Hoffman had stepped into the CEO role for the past 6 months or so after Dan Nye left in December of last year after two years in the post. Now the transition to Weiner looks complete.

cnet reports

“LinkedIn was founded to harness the power of the Internet to create a tool that would help individuals become more effective and successful professionals,” Hoffman said in a release. “Over the past six months, Jeff has done an exceptional job leading the company and I look forward to continuing the work that we have begun together.”

LinkedIn claims 42 million members which makes their audience bigger than Twitter but far smaller than Facebook’s 200 million plus members. What LinkedIn can claim that neither of the other two can is that it

hopes to be profitable this year for the second year in a row; it makes money not only from ads, but from premium subscriptions and “corporate solutions.”

Profitable? For a second year in a row? Not often we use that word here in the present tense when it comes to social media companies let alone talking about starting a ‘profitable year streak’. In the past, Hoffman has expressed the desire to go public and last year was looking for a billion dollar valuation when raising $53 million. If you want to play the “What is LinkedIn worth now?” game go right ahead. In this market it looks like anyone’s guess is as good as the next.

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It’s a fascinating read–mostly because it highlights the difference in internet habits of C-level executives,  based on their age. Why is this important? Because those executives that are under 40 will likely, in the next 5-10 years, be the ones taking over the CEO role.

When they do, we’re going to see a dramatic shift in the way company executives research and contribute to the web.

And there’s good news for search marketers too!

Get your free copy of the report!

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One dictionary suggests "an indefinite quantity that is above the average in size or magnitude."

Well, thanks to Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, we now have another definition of "boatloads"–its the precise amount of money it would take for her to sell Yahoo to Microsoft. Not a penny more, not a penny less!

Speaking during an interview at the D7 conference, Bartz explained her stance on selling Yahoo to the Redmond company:

“If there’s boatloads of money, and there’s the right technology, and the information we would have to have, then yeah….It’s that simple.”

There you go! It’s that simple!

Although, as we all know, it’s not that simple. Mostly because Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’s not interested in sending out barges laden with cash. And, when you consider Microsoft is about to launch its new search product (likely today at D7), you could argue that Bartz has missed the boat–or her ship has sailed–when it comes to getting what she wants from the deal.

PS. You can read more from the Carol Bartz interview here. You’ll find she has quite the sense of humor.

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