I had no idea what Thomson Financial did until I heard Dick Harrington explain it as “ we provide information for decision-makers (bankers, lawyers, doctors, scientists). We look at how they use our data to make their decision, which creates value for their customers (and make profits). We then assess how we can incrementally increase that window for decision-making and what additional data may be needed.
Business acumen – Thomson Corporation had an aggressive focus on revenues, return on capital, operating margins, and free cash flows. All actions were taken with this filter including whether we bought a printer vs leased it! The clarity of a business strategy was well communicated to all staff including how they contributed and this was aligned with strong talent management. Ram Charan of Execution, was an advisor to the group
In my role, I Grew the off-shored India team from 200-9000 people in the 9 years I was there. Services included the revenue-earning ‘products’ such as product mgt, technology development, and content development. What really excited me was how our products directly linked into the New York Stock Exchange or our Tradeweb product put through $ 26Trillion value of transactions per day and our teams in India were active contributors!
Innovation _ Front-end-Customer-strategy & whether one could drive innovation as a process was something I was involved in during my year under the Group top talent program.
Talk to Gary Hamel, looking at the Doblin methodology for innovation was exciting but the best was to have a program when we tried to build a product for India using the Front End Customer strategy.
The Sales role was just for a year with a clear focus on getting revenues. Though brief it was more insightful about what I truly liked – solving problems for the customer/stakeholder.
My Strategy role came on the back of an intense integration effort fraught with a lot of emotional angst across the 2 teams. This was intellectually fun and gave me the opportunity to reset my trajectory.
Integration of Thomson Reuters – India was the largest location outside of New York and London for this process. I was the only one named in the role and while NY went the Thomson way, London more Reuters, India was truly the integration of 2 equal-sized teams with very different cultures.
All organizational policies had to be integrated ( HR alone had 42 policies with very different people Management philosophies), 1800 roles had been eliminated and people redeployed while the organization grew in HC. The exposure to the Journalistic values was fantastic!
People & org development – Thomson’s Talent Management strategy was written about in Harvard Business Review; we had Ram Charan providing advice and often coaching senior leaders and Steve Denning, Vindi Banga on the Board many of them visited India. We had built very sophisticated models for talent management/ compensation linked to supply-demand. To manage organizational change we used the Path-way-to-Prime methodology from Corporate LifeCycle.
This experience matured me as a leader with strong people-centricity, execution, strategy/innovation, and business acumen capabilities.
