Page 165 - HBR Leader's Handbook: Make an Impact, Inspire Your Organization, and Get to the Next Level

154 HBR Leader’s Handbook

innovation labs around the world from Cape Town, South Africa, to Water-
loo, Canada, where the company’s technologists can work side by side with
customers, partners, and startups, rapidly prototyping solutions. The com-
pany also formed partnerships with blue-chip technology firms like SAP
and IBM Watson to power its solutions. In late 2016, Smith announced the
creation of a new flagship technology center housing up to 1,500 staff in
Toronto to take advantage of the growing concentration of engineering and
technical talent in Canada’s Silicon Valley and moved his headquar- ters
there to reinforce the commitment. One year after the announcement, the
company has hired over 200 technologists and data scientists, and
announced a more than $100 million investment in a permanent facility
for the center. And in early 2018, as a result of the successful efforts to turn
around the Financial & Risk business, Smith sold a fifty-five percent stake
in it to the Blackstone Group for $17 billion, giving Thomson Reuters
greater financial flexibility to transform even further into the future.
In the six years since Smith became CEO, Thomson Reuters has be-
come a vastly different company, now focused, as Smith puts it, at the in-
tersection between commerce and regulation. As such, Thomson Reuters
strives to help businesses of all sizes—from solo practitioners to global cor-
porations—find answers to their most pressing problems. Along the way,
the company has become more focused, more profitable, faster growing,
and on the list of most admired and most desirable firms to work for. And
while no company’s future is ever guaranteed, Thomson Reuter’s future
seems more promising than ever.

Balancing the present and future

One of the biggest challenges for leaders is maintaining the continued op-
eration of the core business or of their unit while also looking ahead to
avoid future threats and create opportunities for future growth. While it’s
easier to focus on one or the other, as a leader, you must do both, even if
you are working in a midlevel role and are primarily responsible for gen-
erating cash or other near-term operational results. Whatever your role, if
you give all your attention to your everyday core, you can get mired in