The Australian Financial Review
To get ahead. Do you need a career plan?
I applaud people who sort of actively manage their careers. You know, folks who have a good sense of the market, a good sense of where they fit and how they would be valued in the external market. I've never really done that. You know, when someone says, 'What's your career plan?' I've never really had one. I very much sort of done the job in front of me and had my eyes open as to where I might learn more.
Welcome to 15 Minutes with a Boss, a podcast about success, failure, and all the lessons learned along the way. I'm your host, Sally Patton, and my guest today is Steve Hasker, the president and chief executive of Thomson Reuters, a global technology and information company that owns the Reuters news agency and provides data and insights to the legal, tax, risk, and accounting sectors. Thomson Reuters has 27,000 employees globally and is valued at around $40 billion US on the share market. Thank you so much for coming in today, Steve. Great to see you.
Thanks for having me, Shel. Good to be here.
Now, we've only got 15 minutes. I'm going to start the clock right now. What time do you get up? What happens? Do you run a marathon in the morning?
I certainly don't run a marathon in the morning. I try to get up somewhere between 5 and 6:00 a.m., but it does vary depending on which time zone I'm in. So, I spend upwards of 50% of my time on the road and quite often in different time zones. And so, I do my best to manage around that, but try to get up between 5 and 6:00 and try to do a workout of some kind.
And do you do the breakfast thing?
I do the breakfast thing. Yes. I think it's very important part of the day. For breakfast tends to be berries, yogurt, and some coffee.
Sounds very healthy. Has there been a project that you were offered, a promotion you were given that changed the trajectory of what you were doing?
Yeah, I mean, I've had a simple sort of philosophy throughout my career. I don't think it was particularly cleverly sort of constructed early on, but I basically used as a north star the idea that I would take on projects and roles, assignments, lateral, whatever they might be, new jobs, if I felt that they were going to afford me the opportunity to learn more. And that's been the north star more so than title than compensation. And essentially when you dig beneath that I tried to get a sense for whether I could learn more from a new set of people than I was learning from those that I happen to be working with. And it sort of simplifies things because it can be very confusing if you think well someone offers you a better compensation level or a big title or some other sort of interesting entanglement, but I think the learning curve is a really important one.
So has that meant that you have changed companies a lot or has that meant that you have moved around a lot with your current employer?
Yeah, I haven't changed companies a lot. I worked for PW as it was known then PWC for 4 and a half years. I then worked for McKinsey for almost 12 years, Nielsen for eight, TPG for two and now I've been at Thomson Reuters almost seven. So I think it's very much been a question of sort of assignments, promotions, the chance to work in different markets and different parts of the world where that sort of learning orientation has been the north star.
And can you give me an example of a time when you did just that? You accepted a promotion or took on a new role because you were going to learn something new. What were you doing and what did you go and learn?
Yeah, there have been many of those. I mean I was a partner at McKinsey in New York and thoroughly enjoying the work I was doing there. I was on the partner election committee at McKinsey and really I think viewed as sort of part of the furniture there as someone who'd probably stay for their entire career. And a guy called Dave Calhoun came along and David had spent 27 years at GE under Jack Welch amongst others and he had come to be the CEO of Nielsen when five private equity firms took Nielsen private. And he approached me and he said look I'd like you to leave McKinsey and I'd like you to join Nielsen to help sort of turn around that business. And I said oh you know it sounds interesting, has to say more. And he said, 'Well, I'm going to teach you how to operate businesses.' And he said, 'You consultants think you can do that, but very few of you can, and if you're prepared to come and put a hard day's work in and learn, I'll teach you how to do that.' And I remember going home that night thinking, 'This is a tough one. I don't want to leave McKinsey, but if one of the world's better operators is prepared to take me under his wing and teach me how to operate businesses, I'm going to learn a lot. And I'm probably going to learn a lot more than I would spending another three, four, five, ten years in consulting. And so I decided to do it. And it was a great learning experience. Very difficult. I made lots and lots of mistakes. But he showed enough support that when I made a mistake, he would sort of turn it into a learning experience rather than turning it into a really bad moment from which difficult to recover.
And do you think if someone had not sort of seen the promise in you and seen your skills that you might have gone and done that? How important was it that someone was prepared to recognize in you what perhaps you couldn't recognize in yourself and take you in a new direction?
It's a great question, Sally. I mean, I think I applaud people who sort of actively manage their careers. You know, folks who have a good sense of the market, a good sense of where they fit and how they would be valued in the external market. I've never really done that. You know, when someone says, 'What's your career plan?' I've never really had one and I envy people who do, but other than this learning orientation, I've very much sort of done the job in front of me and had my eyes open as to where I might learn more. And I think with that orientation, I've been probably less active about sort of seeking new opportunities and a little bit more passive. And I wouldn't recommend that for talented young people. I think, you know, having a sense for what you're worth in the marketplace and where the opportunities is important. I've probably been a little bit more passive, focused on the job I'm doing and had an assumption or at least a hope that people would see that and see some talent and say, 'Okay, we're going to look for another opportunity for him.'
That's interesting. So, what do you advise people who are younger than you to have a better sense of themselves and to manage their careers more than you did?
Yeah, I mean I think the most important thing which is starting to become at least in the US part of the orthodoxy is you've got to put yourself in situations where you take some career risk and you make some mistakes. You know, I don't go to many conferences, but I was in a conference earlier this year and the head of HR for one of the world's biggest private equity firms. So, she's responsible for hiring, attracting, retaining, developing two or three hundred CEOs. And you know, I asked her one-on-one, you know, what are you looking for today that might be different than you were looking for two years ago or three years ago? And she said, we look for people who've made mistakes.
Yeah. Interesting. I love that. Okay. My next question is about career advice. What's the best piece of career advice you've ever received?
Do more listening than talking.
And tell me how you put that into action.
Well, I've always been in sort of versions of client service. I started my career and qualified as a chartered accountant and studied economics, but at the end of the day, I think I'm a sales person. I enjoy sales. And I think the single most important thing in sales is to do more listening than talking. I think you learn a lot more if you're prepared to just hold your breath for a second or two and let people express their points of view. Particularly with clients when you understand the context in which they're operating and the sort of opportunities and threats that they face and their business faces. It makes you better in terms of your ability to respond to that and potentially meet or exceed some of those needs.
And do you find that you have to bite your tongue to do that or does that come quite naturally?
It can depend on how jet-lagged I am. I have to bite my tongue. You know, I consider myself quite an extroverted person and so, you know, happy to lead a conversation where that's appropriate, but I have a simple rule which is I'll speak with at least one customer every single day. We have over 600,000 customers at Thomson Reuters. So I can't speak with all of them, but I figure if I have my ear to the ground and I'm listening to at least one customer, and sometimes it's ten or twenty or a hundred customers, you know, I'll learn more from those conversations than I will internally. You know, internally, organizations tend to sort of become a bit echo chamber-like and particularly as it pertains to the sort of messages to the chief executive of the board, they can be sanitized, which is not very helpful. You know, bad news doesn't age well, so the saying goes. And so listening to customers and really understanding what they're up against. And I say to our account people, please, if you're thinking about taking me to one of your customers, take me to the one who's not happy and take me to the one who's sort of struggling with the particular use of our software or our content, our data, and where perhaps we're not meeting or exceeding the needs of that customer as we aspire to because we learn more from those interactions and we get better from them.
