Category: Blog

Changing Places

Posted on by tomglocer
My family and I recently moved back to New York from London entailing the usual house office and school changes. As much as I was dreading the hassle associated with forwarding mail changing bank accounts and packing boxes I have to say it is a very healthy thing to do.
Over the last 20-odd years my wife and I later joined by two kids and a large dog have lived in New York London Paris and Tokyo. These have each been great professional postings for me and have given our family the opportunity to explore new cultures make new friends and expand our horizons — in every sense.
The other benefit that a major move offers is the chance to look critically at all the possessions clutter and detritus that one tends to accumulate over time and then leave them behind like a snake molting its old skin. While it may feel nostalgically pleasant to keep each pair of running shoes you have owned since high school the truth is unless you are Usain Bolt you can probably live quite happily with only one pair.
Kids of course are veritable magnets for every trinket that ever lived at the bottom of a birthday party goody bag as well as a menagerie of stuffed animals and incomplete card decks. However adults keep up their own with copper camels that screamed "buy me" at the Giza gift shop or the combination ice cream maker and hairdryer from Akihabara.
Child or adult the lesson is the same: We collect a lot of junk in our consumer lives. We should be thankful that we are able to afford these luxuries but also take the advantage of a new start to give our old possessions to any thrift store that will take them and live a less consumerist life in our new location.

Sun Valley 2008

Posted on by tomglocer
What goes on in Sun Valley stays in Sun Valley. Those are the ground rules and I may be one of the few attendees of this the best organized and most rewarding business conference to respect the wishes of our hosts. However without revealing the "who said what " I set forth below my very personal views on some of the most urgent issues facing us today prompted by presentations at this year’s conference .
1. Energy. Perhaps the greatest of the interlinking challenges that confront us – part economic part environmental and and part geopolitical. At an earlier Sun Valley conference Tom Friedman posited the theorem that the democratic tendencies of any oil producing nation are inversely proportional to the price of oil. Since Tom has repeated this view elsewhere I will raise the cone of silence sufficiently to agree with him.
While the efforts of the present US government to promote the development of alternative energy have been lacking (some would say totally absent) I am heartened to see the level of venture activity focused on alternative energy. From revisiting the basic technology employed to generate nuclear power (a Gates/Myrvold venture) to novel ways to "grow" petroleum in the lab the incredible innovative spirit of entrepreneurs around the world is visible in the search to create new alternatives. The only sure thing is that there is no obvious solution today and that we will be surprised by where it eventually comes from. In this the future of energy will obey the traditional rules of technology development: We always over-estimate what technology can deliver in the short term and under-estimate what can be done over 10+ years.
2. Israeli-Palestinian Peace. The key to long term stability in the entire region and in my view the only way to ultimately support moderate Arab allies in the fight against Jihadist extremism. The failure to achieve the goal that Sadat and Rabin were tantalizingly close to realizing still prevents a lasting security for Israel Lebanon and their neighbors and lately has provided the cover for Iran to extend its influence through Syria Hamas and Hezbollah. The high price of oil only compounds the difficulty of achieving a lasting peace.
3. The US Economy. Beyond the cyclical issues bedeviling the US economy there are a set of long-term fundamental issues which must be confronted to give our children the chance to enjoy a standard of living at least equal to our own. Most fundamental of all Americans consume far more international goods than we export to our trading partners. Each day the US trade deficit expands by about $2 billion which really means that we are signing a $2 billion daily IOU to keep consuming at the level to which we are accustomed. Although the size of the US economy is vast eventually this sort of deficit spending will bankrupt any household. While US exports have benefited from a cheaper dollar and are expanding nicely $140 dollar oil imports have undermined this structural readjustment. This is another reason we need to solve the energy issue.

4 . Deleveraging Wall Street. This Olympic year the Chinese are likely to surpass the US in gold medals. However the "Dream Team" of Bernanke Geitner and Paulson deserve great credit for their work to date in avoiding a very hard landing for the global economy. We are by no means out of the woods yet but the weekend Bear Stearns was rescued by a joint Fed/JP Morgan bailout the world came within hours of a very ugly meltdown of the highly interlinked global financial system. The somewhat inevitable support of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continues this stewardship. The very tricky maneuver the Dream Team is trying to pull off is to permit Wall Street to massively deleverage while avoiding the twin evils of high inflation and recession.

5 . Trade. There are nasty protectionist winds blowing across what used to be know as the world’s trade routes (anyone remember the "trade winds"?). While protectionism always seems to appeal to the local politician and anti-globalization zealot it is the surest route to world impovrishment. Smith and Ricardo got it right over 200 years ago; what is needed is a social safety net to protect the individual losers in the globalization process not a luddite ban on international trade itself. See blog entry: London Chamber of Commerce – International Trade Dinner: Free Trade The Environment ad Social Welfare (Feb. 2007).
6 . Multilateralism. The US has pursued a unilateralist approach to world affairs over the past seven years (if one ignores the strong-arming of super ally and "lapdog" the United Kingdom which all but cost Tony Blair his position). Our current challenges are too large to "go it alone" and the loudest voices are coming from the over-stretched US military which is valiantly trying to prosecute too many wars at the same time.
7. Healthcare /Social Security. If the explosion of the housing bubble/credit crisis does not get your attention just wait until the US finally starts grappling with the huge looming cost of the still porous safety net. It cannot be beyond the wit of the nation that put a man on the moon to provide basic healthcare for all its citizens and a secure retirement. It does no good to point fingers at individual beneficiaries of the current insolvent system – a comprehensive restructuring of the way healthcare is delivered and financed is needed.
8. Immigration. Senator McCain was vilified within his own party for suggesting that all was not perfect with current Republican policy towards immigration. We should all celebrate the role of immigrants in building the American dream and be grateful that so many people the world over still seek our shores. Not only do immigrants add to the economic might of the US but those that choose to return to their countries of origin spread the word that we are not the "Great Satan" we may appear if aerial bombardment is one‘s first encounter with the US.
This is not an exhaustive list. There are many important issues that I have left off but I want my next president to address at least these. Perhaps it is my Thomson Reuters commitment to independence and freedom from bias but I am truly beyond ideology – I just want my next president to be competent.

Classical vs. Jazz

Posted on by tomglocer
Some of the readers of this blog have asked me why I do not write more about business issues that directly affect my work at Thomson Reuters. This is a very fair question especially since I find the issues raised by the digital content markets we serve among the most interesting business topics of our time.
My answer is two-fold. First I write for pleasure not for any particular business purpose. Thus I write when I have the time (typically on long airplane trips) and when I feel I have something to say (unfortunately less frequently than my time in the air). Much as most of my pleasure reading (science and technology aside) tends to be serious fiction or as a classical pianist might prefer to play jazz when not at work I usually prefer to explore areas beyond my work in this blog.
Second when I do write about the company explicitly such as in the post Intelligent Information Comes of Age or in one of the presentations I have given in an official capacity (e.g Trust in the Age of Citizen Journalism) I run the content through Corporate Legal and Comms. While this is good corporate housekeeping it tends not to add to the spontaneity of the writing so I keep it to a minimum.
If there are any particular business issues that readers would be interested in post a reply to this entry and securities laws permitting I will try to address them.

Terminal 5 and Celebrating the Good

Posted on by tomglocer
British Airways which is probably the company I know best as a customer after my various broadband providers recently went through a period of pretty savage attacks in the UK media for their serious operational problems opening Terminal 5 at Heathrow.
Some of this was deserved as for several years the answer to all service issues on the ground at Heathrow was a version of "Don’t worry Terminal 5 will solve everything." Of course it did not. The problems were also compounded by the decision to make a big bang rather than phased transfer of flight operations to the new terminal.
That said I have been flying in and out of Terminal 5 now for weeks and the experience is a vast improvement. The terminal itself is architecturally compelling clearly marked and reasonably efficient. Undoubtedly BA deserved a measure of drubbing in the local print media for building up expectations for Terminal 5 — I have been flying long enough to remember pretty ghastly first weeks at new airports from Denver to Hong Kong . However I can’t help feeling that there was a perverse pleasure or schadenfreude enjoyed in stretching BA on the rack for its short-comings much as the veneer of true sympathy always seemed spread quite thinly when Tim Henman would predictably exit Wimbledon before the Semis.
There are many good things in the UK worthy of praise – it is time to celebrate them.

Strange Loops

Posted on by tomglocer
I have been reading an excellent book I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter which represents a rare departure for me from the land of good fiction. Hofstadter who is a Professor of Cognitive Science and Computer Science at Indiana University achieved fame in the weird circles I frequent for his first major book Gödel Escher Bach in 1999.
The subject of Strange Loop like much of his scholarship is the difference between brain and mind the origin of consciousness at what point along the continuum of amoeba mosquito human embryo dog chimp and the adult human being does a "soul" arise? and perhaps the greatest of all biological religious and philosophical issues where does the "I" go when we die?
There has been much written but little proved empirically on these interesting existential questions. Unfortunately much of the public debate in the US over the past seven years has focused on substituting a quasi-religious political view (stem cell research violates human dignity; "partial-birth" abortions offend God etc. ). How refreshing then to have a scientist who sticks to his subject matter and comes up with a perfectly sound set of explanations of how consciousness could have arisen in sufficiently complex brains or other computing structures. At root what is required is a symbolic or representational system of sufficient complexity that it can create and build symbols on the backs of prior symbolic building blocks including the most complex symbol of all – the strange recursive loop we call "I".
This may all sound very esoteric and far fetched but Dr. Hofstadter writes with a breezy self-deprecating wit and his musings on where a person’s "I" or "soul" goes when the physical body dies is worth the read alone. As I have been spending far too much time at 38000 feet (usually within a speeding airplane) I have had the time to read a bit more broadly than the usual .ppt .doc and .xls..
I generally read fiction for pleasure because I find it a wonderful antidote to the endless stream of corporate-speak memoranda I need to read. I have also always found that fiction and indeed poetry can penetrate more closely to the core of the great issues human beings must grapple with (like why are we put on this earth why do good poeple die young etc.) than even the most analytically probing non-fiction essay – somewhat akin to Heisenberg’s uncertaintly principle that you can not measure both the location and momentum of a given particle..
In any event it is time to return to the real world . Beam me up Scottie!

Avoiding Politics

Posted on by tomglocer
The well-worn advice that polite guests should avoid politics and religion at the dinner table surely must apply with renewed vigor to the chief executive of an information company which prides itself upon and is constitutionally bound to maintain its independence and freedom from bias. The polite and editorially-minded shall not be disappointed in me. However I must confess that I have found this to be a difficult rule for me to obey during the past seven years. My friends and family know why.
What is fully in keeping with the Reuter Trust Principles is for me to observe that the American political system with its seemingly endless and moneyed build-up has now served up a genuine choice for the electorate. Purists will no doubt complain that the two-party system already represents a political bias in that it excludes many along the political spectrum from the American Communist Party to the American Nazi Party. This is no doubt true but like many things American the system focuses on the pragmatic: who can really be elected?
I shall cast a personal and private vote this November but as flawed as the electoral process surely is I am grateful that I have a clear choice to make.

Chelsea Flower Show 2008

Posted on by tomglocer

This year my friend and internet ad pioneer Stephen Klein did not come to the Chelsea Flower Show. This was a shame not only because I like to spend time with Steve but also because it reduced by 50 percent the number of attendees at the Show’s opening night who actually care about flowers. Fortunately the Queen had a more developed sense of duty.

Last night’s event was quite memorable. It was freezing cold as usual for a late May evening in London but at least it did not rain. The opening night drew the usual mix of bankers lawyers FTSE 100 CEOs and Chairmen to ogle each other while pretending (not too strenuously) to view the flower gardens. From my perspective it was reassuring to see so many Thomson Reuters clients working the crowd seemingly unaware that the UK media had declared that the "End is Near."

Many of the gardens on display really are spectacular labors of love. My favorite which seemed to best capture the zeitgeist of the times was the Asian themed grass-covered rolling dunes complete with an industrial-sized espresso machine. This surely best combined the gardening and banking cultures at work at Chelsea last night.

Response to Some Recent Blog Comments

Posted on by tomglocer
This post responds to a couple of comments on prior entries. First there was a request to comment upon emerging markets in general and Brazil’s Vasco da Gama football club in particular; second another reader pointed out that the Thomson Reuters concept of "intelligent information" requires engagement with people and questioned how we would seek to achieve this.
My opinion of Vasco da Gama Futbol Club is simple: I prefer Corinthians of Sao Paulo to the Rio de Janeiro team. Corinthians have not had much to celebrate lately but they have been home in the past to such greats as Rivaldo Edilson Dida and Socrates. As for emerging markets more generally see blog entry below Is it Brazil’s Time? from April 2007 in which I express the hope and conviction that Brazil has finally emerged. Progress during the last year including the appreciation of the Real the merger of the mighty BMF and Bovespa the tide of inbound FDI and the attainment of investment grade ratings confirm these expectations for Brazil. As for other developing markets I have found them to be rewarding if at times volatile markets for investment but always colorful and personally fulfilling places to explore. This personal interest has been well aligned with a historic Reuters strength and with what I expect will be a real opportunity for Thomson Reuters.
As for the importance of embracing human beings with the intelligent information that Thomson Reuters provides I can understand the question given the prominence I have given to machine consumption of data in the Web 3.0 world but I would not give up on people so fast. First to make information truly "intelligent" for professionals it must be created and tagged by people who truly understand what their customers do – as we say in our ads our "people know what you do because they do what you do." Thus the Thomson Reuters Legal business employs so many lawyers (not including me!) that it would number among the top 15 law firms in the US. Second we work with our customers and provide them training to ensure that they get the most out of the products and services that we provide.
I see no conflict or tension between man and machine. I recognize the frustrations of everyday life in having some not as yet very intelligent machines answering customer service queries and I am sympathetic to individuals whose jobs may have been replaced by technology but in general I think the advent of technology has raised the standard of living of more of the planet than at any prior time in history and I believe that we are only at the beginning of a very exciting era in which intelligent agents and other forms of computer technology will enrich and prolong our lives.

Intelligent Information Comes of Age

Posted on by tomglocer

I thought I’d share with the readers of this blog a brief thought-piece I wrote explaining why Thomson Reuters is focused on providing what we call "intelligent information." The subject is a bit closer to my "day" job than I usually like to write about on this blog but these days my day job is not leaving much time for anything else.

In his 1977 doctorial dissertation called the “Information Economy” technology visionary Marc Uri Porat defined the information economy as occurring when labor related to the creation processing and dissemination of information exceeds work related to the other three economic sectors – agriculture industry and service. Based on that definition Proat tells us that the information economy arrived in the West in 1967 when 53 percent of labor income in the total workforce was derived from the information sector.

Forty years later information is at the core of all economic sectors in the developed world and an increasingly influential element in emerging markets. The amount of information how we receive and consume it and whether or not we trust it has been radically altered with the advent of the Internet. This revolution has also created a growing global need for “intelligent” information.

What is intelligent information? It is certainly insightful and well written text but it is also dynamic content delivered in electronic formats. It is self-describing self-organizing and action-oriented. As we pass from Web 2.0 to the semantic web envisioned for Web 3.0 intelligent information will be its common language.

Intelligent information has never been more valuable. Professionals will pay for just the right information delivered at just the right time and place in their workflow. In fact people like lawyers doctors scientists accountants and those who power the world’s financial markets will pay to be given less information – but precisely the right information that helps them make better decisions faster.

Consider this: None of us would pay for tomorrow’s weather forecast because the information has been commoditized; it is universally available. If you are a provider of consumer-grade weather information you have little option other than to monetize your content via advertising. But imagine that you provide very accurate long-range hurricane forecasts; now businesses such as property and casualty insurers will pay you handsomely for your professional grade information.

With the number of professionals growing especially in emerging markets like China and India the global demand for intelligent information is booming. The world in a sense is professionalizing and doing so in real time. At the same time physical industries are transforming into information businesses. We saw this in financial markets as currencies went off the gold standard and began trading electronically. A similar transformation is underway in the pharmaceuticals industry. Once a chemical compound discovery and manufacturing business it is now all about decoding analyzing and manipulating the human genome.

As a result a huge opportunity has emerged for companies that can provide access to intelligent information. The information majors are already establishing their territories.

At Thomson Reuters we are staking our claim to the delivery of the kind of critical intelligent information that professional decision-makers must rely upon to do their jobs.

We will provide this professional-grade information and related applications to businesses and professionals in the financial legal tax and accounting media scientific and healthcare markets. These markets require huge amounts of information typically delivered in real-time which can be consumed by machines as well as human beings.

To meet these demands the new class of “information majors” will need to be global highly innovative experts in each sector they seek to serve and able to invest in huge databases and sophisticated search and data mining capabilities.

We are building such a company at Thomson Reuters and based on the people and assets of the companies coming together to form this new information leader we are already well on our way.

Thomson Reuters Launches!

Posted on by tomglocer

As has probably been evident I have been pretty busy over the past few weeks attending to the birth of an extraodinary new company. OKAY I am partial and the company is not exactly "new" as Thomson Reuters is the offspring of two proud parents with long corporate histories.

I usually try to avoid talking too much shop as most corporate blogs bore me to death and Thomson Reuters operates a perfectly adequate corporate site at www.thomsonreuters.com. However the planning and launch have been so time-consuming and I am genuinely so excited about the people business and prospects of the company that I can’t think of anything else that is even remotely as interesting to write about.

I may have drunk the Kool-Aid but it sure tastes good.