Reuters CEO: Adopt technology or die

Jim Smith, president and chief executive officer of Thomson Reuters, talked McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland about the company’s strategy.

Here is an excerpt:

That challenges an organization like ours that’s grown through the green-screen days and is very focused on getting the information exactly right—the way some consumer folks have learned—and not so much on the end-user experience. So that’s a bit of a challenge for us. And we’re out hiring some talent to bring that kind of DNA into our company.

It’s more design thinking. It’s more about the context. For us, it’s about making information immediately useful. That’s really important. And when I think about the future, I have whole categories of places where I’m confident we have the best information.

I don’t worry about being obviated by someone who’s going to come out and do the information a bit better. I worry about people who can take good-enough information and make it more useful, because they’re delivering it in more relevant ways.

I think that we’ve done a very good job—amongst the old-information publishers—of adopting technology early. But what we did is we took the library onto the desktop. And people went to the desktop and they did research. The current phase we’re going through is taking that desktop and putting it in the hands of the professional.

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