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
19
Voice is Another Country
Filed Under B2B, Blog, eBook, Education, eLearning, Financial services, healthcare, Industry Analysis, internet, mobile content, news media, Publishing, Search, semantic web, social media, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Its obvious, isn’t it? Any voice application is bound to be a winner. We all love being spoken to in leisure or learning moments. What is the easiest way in which to absorb information? Have it spoken to you. From the audio book to the sat nav machine, voice works. As humans, we can project so much onto a voice. Its “colour” gives instant clues, and even the road directions to Southend-on-Sea can become injected with implied threat or promise. And hearing things is restful, even absorbing. Having a novel read in one ear can be superbly engrossing, and while there is always the risk of being alienated by the reader’s interpretation, chances are that the audio book will be the way we “see” that text, once we have heard it, for ever. I have an old record of T S Eliot reading The Waste Land which I can no longer play because I have no form of media that will play it. So I naturally became an early user of the App, which has 9 versions of the poem being read, including the poet himself. Most of them are far better, but because I heard it first, when I read the poem aloud myself, I find that I use the poet’s cadence and timing. In other words, voice imprints and can be unforgettable.
Which brings me to Siri. The Apple iPhone voice App has now had three months of shrill publicity (http://www.transhumanistic.com/2011/10/new-iphone%E2%80%99s-killer-app-%E2%80%93-voice-controlled-personal-assistant/) and (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uo5CUgEYKI&noredirect=1).
Given its ability with natural language searching, which gives it a degree of “intelligence”, reviewers think this should be a winner, and I agree on one level. On another I have some reservations, and these are largely concerned with our apparent inability to position and market voice services effectively.
Twenty years ago a senior executive at Random House told me that I was wasting my time with “Multimedia”, which was what we were then working on for CD-ROM. All the market wanted, he said, were good audio readings to play in the car on long distance travel, and he introduced me to his bright young manager who was providing just that. That manager told me two things that have stuck with me: one was the now obvious reflection that publishers were rubbish at marketing anything at all, and this would never change since they believed that they could sell anything. The second was that voice markets appeared to him to be finite: you quickly reached the voice susceptible segment, then growth got very hard. It is a thought that comes back as even Barnes and Noble discover digital (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/49567-barnes–noble-sees-bright-future-in-digital.html). And who would have thought that would happen!
My young friend of then is now the manager of an important media venture fund, so I will preserve his anonymity. And I do not want to argue that eBook or digital versioning is similarly finite. But I do want to suggest that voice is a vital component of the network and thus of digital service provision, that we grossly neglect its impact in product and service development, and that but for two unfortunate voice misuse environments we would be using a great deal more in more intelligent environments. I am told for example that voice search is now a really easy application to roll out in many service contexts. However, the reason given for its relatively modest showing is the prevalence of hugely annoying telephone voice menu systems, which daily have reasonable people howling in frustration. Having discovered a rare four tier example this week in a hospital group, I am tempted to initiate an award scheme for organizations who employ human beings to answer the phone. The second is automated public service messaging in airports and elsewhere, but in terms of both the problem is not voice, but marketing. I even encountered an airport lounge in my October travels which announced, every five minutes, that no flight departure announcements would be made and that passengers should consult the information screens!
For all of these reasons the future of voice is vital. Siri may point the direction towards intelligent guidance, but completely voice-directed computing has been feasible for a long time and must be a part of the five year scenario. And you do not need to have a Babelfish in your ear to believe in voice/language text translation, which the network is begging for in countless sectors and which is increasingly feasible at a basic level. Slowly we will edit out poor voice practises and it will become rare for web environments to lack audio components as it is for them now to lack video activity. I have had the pleasure recently to work with a group in Dublin who are creating virtual environments to help students pass tests in proficiency in spoken languages. There is an early example at http://www.examspeak.com but there is much more to come. The network is the ideal environment for voice-based training, language learning and virtual voice service development. Eventually the digital communications revolution will come full circle and re-integrate voice as the critical element in networked communications that it always has been, and we shall wonder why this component took so long to fall into place.
And then, we shall call the health insurer through the network and hear his computer say, “Forget all those options and numbers – tell me how I can help”!
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