Meet The Modest Man Behind Your BlackBerry
Posted June 19, 2009 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
For the amount of attention it gets, Waterloo is still a quiet burg of just over 120,000 people nestled amid prime southwestern Ontario farmland. The entire region, including the larger cities of Kitchener and Cambridge, has a population approaching only 500,000.
And yet even here, in this small city that Tom Jenkins has called home for more than two decades while building Open Text Corp. into Canada’s largest software company with nearly $800 million in annual revenue, the executive chairman, chief strategy officer and former CEO is largely anonymous.
With a stocky five-foot-nine build, short grey hair, folksy drawl and love of Sudoku puzzles, Jenkins’s star quality is negligible. There’s no dramatic sweep of silvery hair like Mike Lazaridis has or the aggressive domed pate of Jim Balsillie, the nearly iconic co-CEOs of Research In Motion who put Waterloo on the map, first with their BlackBerry business, and then by spending tens of millions of dollars of their personal fortunes to establish research institutes (and chase pro hockey franchises).
Jenkins could easily be mistaken for your average sales guy, modest in almost every way, except for one thing: his ambition to make Canada a global powerhouse in digital media.
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Photo credit: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
