Dec
3
Accelerated Departures Confront Reality Shock
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Financial services, healthcare, internet, news media, Publishing, Reed Elsevier, Thomson, Workflow | 1 Comment
You can tell when even major corporates are embarrassed. Their use of language deteriorates to the point when meaning (hopefully) vanishes and we hacks are left to put our own, corporately deniable, slant on their gnomic pronouncements. Thus it is with the “accelerated departure” of Tom Glocer, CEO of Thomson Reuters. What exactly does that mean? Did he leave before his time, or was he unexpectedly ejected? The rumour mill had it that he was going in April 2012, so was the acceleration to be found there (his fourth anniversary is not a huge senior service for such a stable outfit as Thomson Reuters), or in his contract, or elsewhere? And did he know, or was he pushed?
Certainly it is always alleged that his predecessor, Dick Harrington, did not know that a discreet negotiation continued behind the scenes bringing Thomson and Reuters together with no place in it for him. That, if true, must have been a surprise. Did Tom Glocer come by a similar “confronts reality” shock, as the FT termed it? And what was the reality that was being confronted? I can think of at least three realities that must needs be in the minds of Thomson Reuters CEOs, and none of them relate to the decline in market value which is widely blamed for triggering these changes. The first, and most important, is the nature of the company’s ownership. Wherever a big player is really 55% controlled by the family of its original founders, confidence issues will come into play. This is real control, not the artificial dominance of voting shares practised by Murdochs or Harmsworths in defiance of market views of good practice. And this real control means that, as in the eighteenth century, once the incumbent first minister loses the confidence of the King and his closest advisor, it is impossible to continue in office. That rule applied to the reign of Ken Thomson and John Tory, as it does in the Woodbridge Trust of David Thomson and Geoffrey Beattie. It is simple and natural; you go when the owners no longer believe you can deliver.
And since Thomson Reuters are the largest professional player in the marketplace, it is worth asking what these men need to have confidence about. As far as the press commentary is concerned, one would think that the only issue is the Eikon terminal and its slow start. Well, the history of Reuters is littered with slow starts, one of which let Bloomberg into the marketplace to begin with, and several of which cumulated to create this peculiar position where the smartest and most modern application is also the cheapest and has lost market share in the recession to Bloomberg’s older and more expensive option. In each of these cycles the market for trading systems has returned to rough parity. Over at the professional side of Thomson they know about these cycles, having sometimes been up and sometimes down, but in that market they are currently in the Bloomberg position and Lexis are in the Reuters position. So did Tom Glocer’s acceleration towards the swing doors relate to all this?
Certainly this may have been the symptom, but perhaps it was not the underlying problem. The mandate that Tom Glocer accepted was to build an integrated company and it is possible, as the company became wracked by the issue of combining the parts to create new growth as a whole, that the Woodbridge owners began to doubt whether this aim was ever going to be achieved through these policies. Certainly the sacrificial slaughter of a layer of Reuters management and the balkanization of the company into an unmanageable number of operating units did not lull any misgivings in Toronto, though they may have given rise to rejoicing in old Thomson management circles, where the attitudes of their new Reuters colleagues had been met with all of the enthusiasm that the Anglo-Saxons showed to their new Norman rulers. In the new dispensation we are back down to five divisions, with former Reuters strategy chief (latterly running GRC) David Craig taking the old Market divisions, Legal going to Mike Suchsland, Tax and Accounting to Brian Peccarelli, and Global Growth to Shanker Ramamurthy. Jon Robson gets the Business Development role. What factor is common to all of these? None of them comes from a very long term Reuters and/or Thomson background. A generation has effectively passed.
And what of Jim Smith, the new CEO. Some commentators have him as a caretaker, awaiting the new strategic leader to be found and installed. Others, and I incline to this view, see him as chairman and arbiter of resource and manpower development and deployment to support and drive the integration of these two companies. So not a traditional Thomson CEO, any more than Erik Enstrom is a traditional Reed Elsevier CEO. In the latter case one has a feeling of a profoundly numerate portfolio owner looking to encourage the growth points with acquisition investment, dispose of underperformers and reward successful managers who reliably produce results. It is almost as if Reed Elsevier does not see a need anymore for an informing central strategy about its market positioning, other that “we will invest in anything that works and avoid the bits that don’t”. By contrast, Thomson Reuters is built around a distinctive market positioning, a “big niche” strategy and definite ideas about what it needed to buy, sell or grow to make the aspiration work. And yet… once you have the strategy in place, here too market strategic thinking devolves to the operating unit quite quickly. Hopefully that means that in both of these market leading players, the doors will soon stop revolving at the speed of light and we can get back the real problems of addressing the needs of global information markets in times of scarcity.
PS. One of the items on Jim Smith’s agenda must surely be the finalization of the sale of Healthcare, whose projected disposal was an early agenda item for his predecessor. It is hard to remember but this move has now been projected for almost four years!
Nov
27
Science is a Network
Filed Under B2B, Blog, Education, eLearning, Industry Analysis, internet, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized, Workflow | Leave a Comment
The working lives of scientists are of greater interest today than at any time in human history. They seem, by closing the time gap between speculation and remediation, to have completely changed roles in society. The person in the white lab coat is no longer obtuse, threatening or just eccentric – the scientist will now, with a wave of his network, solve global warming, feed the unfed and cure us all of the illnesses we have yet to contract. The other day I was sent a fascinating article on Open Science by a researcher and software developer plainly angry that “Open Science” is getting such a popular exposure (http://gigaom.com/2011/10/31/why-the-world-of-scientific-research-needs-to-be-disrupted/) while the normal benefits of regularly networked science are being ignored. And it gets one thinking, because it raises a set of issues about the relationships of professionals and their lives in networked societies that has real consequences for all of us.
After I read the above note I then read Jack Stilgoe’s review of Michael Nielson’s book in the Guardian (26.11.2011). While I have yet to read the book, my head is already in the debate in a micro-sample of three views and you, if indeed you are, make up a fourth. Whether you pass your views on to others or not, we are participating in a rapid sharing process which must have effects of its own on communication. If we were scientists and practising what Michael Nielson preaches we would be sharing our thinking, and our results, in very much the same way, standing aside from the competitive sides of our nature to create progress by collaboration within the network. Question: when we say that living in a networked society will cause all sorts of changes to the way we communicate and act, do we mean that these will be changes for the better in our fundamental characteristics as people? Dear Reader, are you an optimist about the improvability of mankind through communication – in which case Facebook may be the saviour of the race? Or, do you believe, like some philosophers of evolution, that the changes that occur will be random mutations, from which some, over time, will become built into the prevalent response mode of network users?
This week I have been thinking a great deal about teachers as well as scientists. Teachers now accept the potential gains from sharing content in a way which would have been anathema to their predecessors. We now have approaching (early next year) 2 million teachers from all over the world sharing their own treasured and successful routines with each other on TES Connect (http://www.tes.co.uk/teaching-resources/). This is a huge demonstration of altruism, and a strong desire to be recognized by peers. In appealing to his fellow scientists to adopt Open Science, Michael Nielsen seeks that same altruism, and argues well for the effectiveness of collaboration, but he is doing so in a context where peer recognition is baked into the way scientists report and publish. Of itself, the network will not change that, and all players (scholars, publishers, schoarly societies and librarians) have colluded willingly with the transfer of the networking of the paper-based world into the digital network with great enthusiasm.
So is there no effective collaborative science? Certainly there is. A very good example which I seem to have been writing about for a decade is Signalling Gateway (http://www.signaling-gateway.org/), where users greatly appreciate the need to share results – and analytical techniques and tools – in a very rapid time frame , but where participant research teams seem to retain identity (and probably funding sources). Nothing is more competitive in research than access to the money. Yet collaboration is present, and in neuroscience, or the Polymath mathematics project, or in the human genome research programme, there are good examples of collaborative success and altruistic sharing. So, if you think this is a desirable outcome, how do you breakdown the conservatism of scientists?
Much as you breakdown the conservatism of teachers, I imagine. You help them to create local, team or institution -based networking which returns real rewards in terms of workflow and productivity. Just as the school budget and timetable system, and resource sharing amongst a community of schools to raise standards through shared content have made a real impression on how schools run and teachers teach (I was impressed this week to see that every US state has now adopted iSchool standards which allow for virtual education systems) so I know that as research teams build better internal network usage and more effective control of content, then the confidence required for Michael Nielson’s wider aims will emerge. So hopefully no government will start flinging funds at Open Science: it would be better spent mandating network compliance on the use of lab chemicals and ensuring that networked analytics were available to ensure that what is known to the network at present can be shared by all participants in the network.
And these are thoughts for publishers and information providers too. We are often faced with a radical urge to change emanating from the top of a deeply conservative community of users. Our task, surely, is to work on the infrastructure and let the profession in question take care of the timing. This can be hugely frustrating, but like Michael Nielsen, we too cannot force a model of change on marketplaces.
Michael Nielsen’s book is “Reinventing Discovery: the new era of networked science” (Princeton University Press). I note with pleasure that it was sponsored by George Soros, a man who has done more good than most on this planet, and whose belief in Sir Karl Popper’s Open Society theories, ingested from the great man himself at LSE, have been a lifelong inspiration. But every change has a precurser, and putting Open in front of something does not change anything. A recent Washington Post article on Virtual Schools was contributed by my best reader/editor: http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/virtual-schools-are-multiplying-but-some-question-their-educational-value/2011/11/22/gIQANUzkzN_story.html?wprss=
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