After nearly 12 years at McKinsey, Steve Hasker had a career many people would have stayed in. But then came a conversation that changed the way he thought about what came next.
"He said, 'Look, all of you consultants think you can be great operators.' He said, 'You can't, but I'm going to teach you how to be an operator.'" The offer came from Dave Calhoun, the former GE executive then leading Nielsen.
For Hasker, the decision was not about titles or compensation. It came down to one question: "Do I think I'm going to learn more if I say yes to that opportunity than if I stay doing what I'm doing?"
Hasker built a career around learning from people who would stretch him, from PwC and McKinsey to Nielsen, and eventually Thomson Reuters. "The single most important part of that learning experience are the people around you."
When Hasker became CEO in March 2020, Covid was forcing companies to rethink how they worked. He had to decide whether to slow down – or use the crisis to accelerate Thomson Reuters' transformation.
"The more time I spent with our customers, the more I realized we don't have a choice here… if we take a pause, by the time the pandemic finishes, we will be three laps of the track behind."
These are Steve Hasker's Executive Decisions.
I know a surprisingly large amount about your childhood, about your father being an engineer turned businessman, your mother being a social worker and psychologist.
I also know that you traveled a lot: Melbourne, Tasmania, Brisbane, Adelaide, and Sydney. Tell me about your formative years.
So, every couple of years, my parents had a habit of accepting another job or a promotion in a different state of Australia.
And so, my elder sister and younger brother and I were sort of asked, or at least forced, to move schools, and I think it was one of the best things that ever happened to us.
You know, at the time, as a six year old, or an eight year old, or a 10 year old, and so on and so forth, it felt very disruptive and quite stressful.
But I think, you know, to be thrown into a completely new school, in a state that we hadn't spent any time in, was formative.
And I think was a great way to sort of refine your ability to get to know a new set of people, create new relationships, and forge ahead.
So, you had these qualities from moving around a lot, which taught you resilience. You had humility, but you also have a love of learning. I think you called it your north star?
Yeah, it is my north star. I mean, I think all of us, you know, as we forge our careers, occasionally we get lucky, and someone who comes along and offers us a new opportunity.
Whether that's a promotion or a different assignment, or an entirely new job at a different institution. And I've always just really had one criteria, which is, do I think I'm going to learn more if I say yes to that opportunity than if I stay doing what I'm doing.
And that really has been the sort of singular criteria that I've applied in making those decisions. So, not so much title, or location or compensation or any of those kinds of things, and I think it's held me in good stead.
That's an interesting part of perhaps all the key executive decisions, dare I say it, that you've made in your career. Just expand upon that a bit more.
Well, I think there's a couple of parts to it. I think the first is, the more you learn, the more options you create for yourself in forging a career, putting yourself on steeper and steeper learning curves.
I've always viewed that that would create more options for me going forward, and I think that's very important.
But when you peel it back, the single most important part of that learning experience are the people around you.
And so what I was really applying was a test as to whether I thought I could learn more working with a new set of people than I was learning in the current environment, because it's the folks around you that teach you.
The number of times where I have had a mentor or a boss pull me aside and say, okay, just observed something you did, and that was great, or that was terrible, I could count on one hand.
But the learning experiences from watching people do what they do, and watching someone do it particularly well, and say, 'Okay, I want to try to emulate that,' and someone else do it particularly badly, and say, 'I want to avoid that.'
Or figuring out which tools and techniques will work with me and will be sort of authentic to who I am as an executive and a leader, versus something that may work very well for you, but would flop if I tried to apply it.
So, if you peel back that sort of learning criteria, it really is about the people with whom you're working.
I can think of at least three mentors in your life already in my studies, and one's your dad, I think you know, and the way he applied himself as a businessman and as an athlete. Tell me about your father, what qualities he had that actually made you who you are?
Yeah, I've been very lucky, as you said, to have worked with some terrific people, and I've always had a view that nobody's perfect, but just about everyone with whom you work can teach you something.
And there's some aspect of their style and their personality, the tools and techniques they use on a daily basis, from which you can learn.
As it pertains to Dad, he was very hard working and always held himself to the highest possible standard.
Was his biggest critic, most times, and really applied the same work ethic to his early days as a track and field athlete, and as a lacrosse player, he represented Australia in both of those sports.
And then early days as an engineer, and then as an executive, as he worked through, and it was a great role model, because my siblings and I saw every day what it means to put in a hard day's work.
I always think that, I say to my kids, I say to the younger members of the team, you need at least one or two of these three things. You've got to be lucky, you've got to have some skill, but you've got to work hard.
And you can be lucky and have skill, but if you don't work hard, the other two aren't necessarily going to create success, and if you've got all three, you got a really good chance of making it.
Yeah, I would say you've got to work hard, and you've got to work hard at the right time. When those opportunities are presented to you, you've really got to drive through them.
How do you excel when you're not in your comfort zone? I've asked a lot of CEOs this. I'm just very interested to see what you have to say.
I try to do two things. One, you know, something I also learned from my father, which is be authentic. You know, I remember going, obviously spending time around the dinner table with he and Mum, but also being lucky enough to go into his office.
And what I noticed as a young kid was there was no difference between his home persona and his work persona, so I think a big part of it is that authenticity.
And applying that authenticity at all times, because it's more durable, and it's authenticity that I think resonates with those around you.
If they figure out that you're sort of putting on some sort of a show, or there's a veneer there, it will crack at some point, and people will see it.
You had this coach, Stuart Ambling, who said champions can be champions in spite of themselves. What did that teach you?
When I was growing up, the great hurdlers were either Americans or Brits, and you know, I had the privilege of competing in a race one Thursday night in my hometown of Melbourne between Colin Jackson and Tony Jarrett.
Who at that time were two of the best three hurdlers in the world. Colin Jackson had the world record at the time.
And you know, I remember saying to Stuart, you know, there's a few things he did that were a little bit, you know, unexpected.
And that's when Stuart came up, he said, 'Champions can be champions in spite of themselves.' In other words, you know, just because Colin Jackson does it one particular way, doesn't mean you could or should emulate that.
What made you go into the career you did with an undergraduate in economics at Melbourne University? You got an MBA at Columbia, and then eventually you ended up at McKinsey in 1998. Tell me a little bit about that period.
Yeah, I mean, I'm someone who's never had a career plan, and whenever I sit down with young folks who are just forging their careers, the question sometimes comes up, you know, what was your career plan, and I will freely admit I never had one, and I probably still don't have one.
And so, I was at the University of Melbourne. I was very focused on track and field, and a number of my friends were taking summer jobs, and I hadn't thought about this.
And I remember driving along Spring Street in Melbourne, and Price Waterhouse, at the time, had just built a new building there, and I sort of looked aside and I thought, well, maybe I'll see if they could take me as a summer associate.
And I had an interview with a man called Alan Fotheringham, who was the head of the audit practice at that time in Melbourne, and you know, I was one of those kids who wasn't ready for an interview, and I wasn't sure it was going that well.
And he said to me, he asked me a question, which was, so why Price Waterhouse? And that's a fairly obvious question, and I should have been prepared for it.
And then suddenly I said to him, Well Alan, can I be honest? He said, 'Yeah, that would be nice.'
And I said, 'Well, I happened to be driving past the building, and I thought the building was terrific.' And as this came out of my mouth, I thought, 'Wow, this is going to be the shortest sort of interview process in the history of this profession.'
And I looked across the table, and he lit up, and it turned out that he had been the sort of sponsor of this new building and had convinced all his partners to sort of get in behind it.
So, I got lucky, and I spent a summer with them, and thoroughly enjoyed the people with whom I worked. Ended up joining them when I graduated, was there for four and a half years before going to Columbia.
And then at Columbia I had a couple of summer interns, one in Russia and one in Salt Lake City, Utah. With the orientation, I was just going to do things that were different.
You just wanted to learn.
Yeah, I probably wasn't going to, you know, work in St. Petersburg, Russia again, or work in a copper mine in Utah again, and so I just picked things that were going to be different experiences.
And McKinsey came knocking during that period of time. You know, it was a bull market, and McKinsey were recruiting on campus, and I was lucky enough to interview with a number of partners, and those interviews went well.
And I started at McKinsey, and ended up being there for almost 12 years, and loved every day of it.
Before I go through one or two questions on McKinsey, do you want to tell me about your St. Petersburg experience? I've got a feeling you had a rum old time out there dealing with some pretty interesting characters.
It was an interesting time. So, essentially, the yogurt entrepreneurs, Stonyfield Farm from New Hampshire, Gary Hirshberg and Samuel Kaymen had been convinced to invest in an ice cream manufacturing joint venture on the outskirts of St. Petersburg and it never really got off the ground.
And so, as a last resort they sort of, we'll get a kid who's got some finance experience to come in and see if he can help straighten things out, and so I landed there in the summer of 1996, and it was a fantastic experience.
What I learned about the sort of Russian culture and the degree of expertise, and the richness of education of everyone I work with, whether in the front office or on the factory floor, was quite inspiring.
And in the end, we ended up sort of selling the stake to a Danish consortium, and the business continued, but it was a bit like the Wild West.
I was going to say, this was the Yeltsin years. This was really chaotic. There was a lot of oligarchs building billion dollar fortunes, perhaps, but with the seizure of state assets, and it was a scary time, wasn't it?
It was. It was in the midst of that sort of seismic transition, so you had a lot of public assets suddenly becoming private, and enormous wealth being created, particularly in Moscow, but to some extent in St. Petersburg as well.
And I had a front row seat to that, and it was a fascinating time.
It was at times, it was at times, because there was sort of an element of Wild West to it, you know, but I was in my mid 20s, and probably silly enough to think that I was indestructible.
I know that you're very proud of your time at McKinsey. Give me some of the key learning curve moments for you there?
I had an experience early on doing a project in New Zealand with Angus Taylor, who's now the opposition leader in Australia, and I thoroughly enjoyed working for Angus. He's extremely bright and a very, very talented problem solver.
And I made a mistake, and it was a pretty bad mistake in terms of some analytics I was doing, and you know, I think Angus showed a great deal of empathy.
I think he figured out that no amount of admonishment from him was going to be as severe as the beating I was giving myself about this particular mistake, and he allowed me to correct it.
So, I learned, I think, you know, a lesson in the leadership and management of people, and you know, so the way he navigated that situation was terrific.
It's very interesting, you were really tough on yourself, tougher than Angus Taylor was when you made that mistake and that sounds to me a little bit like your father coming through.
You said earlier on in this interview your father held himself to very exacting standards as well. Too tough on yourself, him too tough on himself?
There are obviously a spectrum of behaviors here, people who can be too tough, people who are not tough enough. I think one of the challenges and opportunities of leadership is actually reading your team to figure out where on that spectrum people sit.
And so the people who are not tough enough on themselves probably need a little bit of a kick in the pants, and those who are like me or my father, who can be very tough on themselves, don't need a kick in the pants.
Actually need at the right time to have the bar raised and a little bit of encouragement to push along, and so, you know, and Angus certainly figured that out, I think, very, very early.
Did you learn from that yourself? I mean, because you know, one of the points about your career that's very clear, is you're always learning, you have a great curiosity, but you're also kind of, you're very understanding of yourself and others. Did you have to learn that skill for yourself?
I think, Steve, I think I got that from my mother. You know, she's one of these people who, she will get up in the morning and her first thought is about the people around her, you know, and that's a gift.
Most of us don't operate like that. Our first thought is about sort of what does our day look like, and what do we need to do, and I think she's wired differently.
And it's that sort of deep and authentic empathy, and I think I've got some of that, not as much for sure as she has, but one of the things I try to do at Thomson Reuters is focus on the people.
I think it's all too easy to focus on the task, when you're surrounded by Type A personalities who all want to get on and do a good job, and I have to constantly remind myself, just take a step back from that and focus on the people.
It's the people who are going to create the opportunities for those around them. It's the people who are going to teach me what I need to learn, and it's ultimately the people who are going to make us all successful.
