Success Quote by Jim Balsillie

In the mouth of a tech-era businessman, "permanent" is a loaded word. Jim Balsillie built a career in an industry trained to worship the next quarter, the next device, the next hype cycle. So when he urges "a lot of attention" to what is "important" and "real", he is quietly indicting the default setting of corporate life: distraction as strategy.

The line works because it’s both banal and corrective. Of course attention matters, but Balsillie is pointing at how systematically it gets stolen. Markets reward speed and narrative; organizations reward internal metrics that feel measurable even when they’re meaningless. "Pay" is the operative verb: attention isn’t just a virtue, it’s a cost, a budget item, something you can squander. The phrasing implies a world where your focus is continuously being invoiced by urgent emails, investor expectations, and shiny product roadmaps.

There’s also a shadow biography here. As the co-CEO of BlackBerry’s parent company, Balsillie lived through the moment when what looked permanent (dominance in smartphones, brand prestige, enterprise lock-in) turned out to be brittle. Read in that context, "permanent" isn’t nostalgic; it’s a survival tactic after watching the supposedly "real" value of a business evaporate under a platform shift.

The subtext: strategy is not prediction, it’s prioritization. If you can’t separate the lasting from the loud, you don’t just miss opportunities - you misrecognize reality.