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Innovating for the Future 151

house whose businesses included the Reuters news service; the world’s
largest publishing company and information resource for the legal profes-
sion; a Financial & Risk business that provided terminals and data feeds
for major banking and trading institutions; a unit that served as the pri-
mary source of legal, regulatory, and compliance information for the tax
and accounting profession; and an Intellectual Property and Science busi-
ness that helped universities and researchers track and search scientific
findings and patents.
Smith’s most urgent challenge was to fix the Financial & Risk business,
which was by far the largest in the company and had been losing share in
a shrinking market for five consecutive years. The recession and financial
crisis of the previous years had decreased demand for the terminals that
were the bread and butter of the division’s revenue. In his first year, Smith
spent a significant portion of his time working with the Financial & Risk
leaders on investments and strategies to turn the business around and
achieve maximum sustainable growth and shareholder value.
In addition to his focus on the Financial & Risk unit, Smith spent time
with the other business units to review their financial performance, growth
plans, and resource requests. He also visited dozens of customers around
the world, both to strengthen their relationship with Thomson Reuters and
to better understand their challenges.
Early into the job, Smith concluded that he would need to change the
way Thomson Reuters was managed—from a portfolio of individual operat-
ing companies into a far more integrated, less complex, and higher-growth
enterprise. The organization had been built over more than a century
through acquisitions, divestitures, combinations, and spinoffs (including
300 acquisitions in the previous ten years), and each of these structural
changes brought different practices, systems, and ways of working. As a
result, the company was overly complex, expenses were duplicated, pro-
cesses were fragmented, technology was not being leveraged, leaders of the
different businesses weren’t learning or benefiting sufficiently from each
other, and large enterprise customers needed multiple touch points and
contracts to work with the company. Furthermore, this complexity made
it more difficult to deliver the full breadth and depth of Thomson Reuters’