Go Where You’ll Learn More: Thomson Reuters CEO Steve Hasker

0:00A CNBC original podcast. 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, you know, all of you consultants think you can be great operators. He said, you can't. He said, 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 Haska, 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?

0:39Haska built a career around learning from people that 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 Haska 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 realised 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.

1:14These are Steve Hasker's executive decisions.

1:23I know a surprisingly large amount about your childhood, about your father being an engineer to 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. 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.

2:03But I think 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 have 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've 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 we're, you know, someone that 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.

2:45And 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.

3:30I'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 that I was learning in the current environment. Because it's the folks around you that teach you. You know, the number of times where I have had a mentor or a boss pull me aside and say, okay, just observe something you did and that was great or that was terrible, I could count on one hand.

4:09but 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. And 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.

4:47And one's your dad, I think, 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 hardworking and always held himself to the highest possible standard.

5:24was his biggest critic at 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 as an early days 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 a hard day's work? I always think that, I say to my kids, I'll 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.

6:02And 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've 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 times. 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 hear what you have to say. I try to do two things. One, something I also learned from my father, which is be authentic.

6:32I 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.

7:11What did that teach you? When I was growing up, the great hurdlers were either Americans or Brits. And, you know, I had the great, I had a privilege of competing in a race one Thursday night in my hometown of Melbourne between Colin Jackson and Tony Jarrett. Wow. Who, you know, 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 unexpected, and that's when Stewart came up. He said, champions can be champions in spite of themselves. In other words, just because Colin Jackson does it one particular way doesn't mean you could or should emulate that.

7:56What 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.

8:33And 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 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 Pricewaterhouse? And this is a fairly obvious question, right?

9:10And I should have been prepared for it. And 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. You're just the greatest avertisement.

9:40So 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. I was going to do things that I probably - You just wanted to learn. Yeah. I probably wasn't going to do 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.

10:14and McKinsey came knocking during that period of time. 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.

10:35Before 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 Kamen, had been convinced to invest in an ice cream manufacturing joint venture on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, but it never really got off the ground. And so as a last resort, we'll get a kid who's got some finance experience to come in and see if he can help straighten things out.

11:14And 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 worked 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 pretty chaotic. There was a lot of oligarchs building billion-dollar fortunes, perhaps with the seizure of state assets.

11:57And 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. Was it scary? It was at times. It was at times because there was an element of Wild West to it. 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.

12:37I 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, a lesson in leadership and management of people.

13:24And 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 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. And I think one of the challenges and opportunities of leadership is actually reading your team to figure out where on that spectrum people sit.

13:57And 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 be sort of, you know, 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 is very clear is you're always learning. You have a great curiosity, but you've also kind of, you're very understanding of yourself and others.

14:32Did 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, you know, she will get up in the morning and her first thought is about the people around her, you know, and that's a gift. I mean, 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 gotten 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.

15:07I think it's all too easy to focus on the task. You know, 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. We'll come back to your leadership at Thomson Reuters a little bit later on in your journey as well. But you had this great career at McKinsey, 11 years, 1998, 2009.

15:39And then you go to Nielsen. That's a big decision. Why? Yeah. Yeah, so Dave Calhoun, who'd spent 27 years at GE under Larry Bossidy and then Jack Welsh, I got to know him when I was at McKinsey and Dave convinced me to leave McKinsey and go to Nielsen. And essentially his pitch was he said, look, all of you consultants think you can be great operators. He said, you can't. He said, but I'm going to teach you how to be an operator. And I remember going home at night and thinking, who else is going to impart that sort of knowledge? who is going to take the time and the effort, show the interest to sort of take his 27 years of expertise and all the bumps and bruises that went along with that, take the time to teach me.

16:23And I spent eight years at Nielsen, and it's some of the most difficult times of my career, but also some tremendous learning experiences about how to handle pressure, how to work through business problems, take people with very, very disparate interests and motivations and try to bring them together to move forward as one. When you were part of this, and as you say, one of the biggest LBOs at the time, and the pressure involved, you've already mentioned that as well, what were some of the hardest decisions you had to make? Presumably on headcount is always one of the biggest decisions people have to make.

16:56Yeah, I mean, I think the hardest part when I joined was there was a view all the way up to the board that Nielsen's digital media measurement assets, net ratings, buzz metrics, a few other brand names that Nielsen had bought were in great shape. And in actual fact, they weren't. And I had a dreadful day where we had a quality problem in one of the digital metrics, measurement metrics. And I remember getting up in the morning thinking, this is going to be a really difficult day because the phones are going to start ringing. and we're going to have some very irate clients whose numbers are not coming through or they don't make sense.

17:38And the phone didn't ring. It wasn't a single call. It was like a tree falling in the woods. And I remember getting halfway through that morning and thinking it's because they've stopped using our products. They've moved to a competitor and we haven't picked up on it yet. And so that made for some very difficult times. At that time, I was put in a big office at 770 Broadway next to the boardroom. And about the same time, a number of the young engineering talent that I'd hired in just decided, you know what, this is too hard and it's not cool enough, we're leaving. So I picked up my laptop, I walked past my assistant, I got on the elevator, went up to the floor that all these engineers sat in and I just sat down in a cubicle in the middle of the floor and just worked there from that moment on because I thought, well, I'm going to have to connect with these people.

18:27Otherwise, they're all going to leave. What I learned about myself is I much prefer to be out on the floor in the open than I do closet away in an office. Well, I know now at Thomson Reuters, you don't even have an office, do you? No, none of us do. But do you think too many managers, too many leaders, too many CEOs just closets themselves away and wait to be given information rather than going out and getting it from the workforce? Well, that's what it's about for me. I mean, I can't speculate on what other, what other executives, what they prefer, what makes them work. You've seen enough of them, the same as I have.

19:01For me personally, I love sitting in amongst my colleagues. At Thomson Reuters, the CFO sits right next to me, the general counsel, the head of product, the head of IR, and a number of the business unit, literally within feet. I suspect they hate it, but I love it because when you're thinking through something, I mean, you can literally just turn and ask them a question. You don't have to ask someone's assistant to get a time and reserve it in a week's time and figure out a meeting room and you just move quickly. And I remember in my early days at McKinsey doing some work at AOL in Reston, Virginia, and watching the senior team, and this was in the very early days of AOL where they were just conquering everything with that dial-up internet service.

19:49And what was interesting to me was the way in which the senior executives just flowed from one office to another. I mean, you'd be meeting with one of them and the door would open. There was no formalities or niceties. He or she would just start firing questions at their colleague and they would make a decision in real time and move on. And I remember thinking, that's what it means to work in this sort of fast-paced tech sector. And so for me, selfishly, it just means I can get information more quickly. And I think it speeds up the entire organization. And the other part of it is if you sit yourself close to where the door is or where the elevator is, and you watch salespeople come back from sales calls, you have an instant sense of how you're doing.

20:35Because it'll be written on their face as to whether it was a successful sales call or it wasn't. And if you watch enough of them, you'll get a very good sense by the end of the day, let alone by the end of the quarter, as to how a particular product is moving. We'll come on to your time when you joined Thompson Reuters in a few moments time. But in the 21st century, here we are sitting in 2026 as well, a lot of people still working from home, a lot of people like a hybrid lifestyle. In my jobs, I've worked in newsrooms, I've worked in trading rooms as well, and I always prefer the hubbub. It sounds to me you're exactly you that person.

21:10Yeah, I'm not a work from home person. If I work from home, I never quite get started and I never quite finish. I drink too much coffee, I eat too much. So no, I'm much better in an office.

21:25In terms of joining Reuters in February 2020, the timing couldn't have been more interesting. Yeah. We just talked about how gregarious you are and how you like being in a more communal environment. This was the start of COVID. That was an interesting period. Yeah. So I started, I had a week or two overlap with my predecessor, Jim Smith, and he was very gracious about, you know, answering questions and sort of introducing me to people and making sure that my onboarding was as smooth as possible. But essentially, my first day in the job was a Sunday, and I think it was March 15th, 2020, which, of course, was the day before sort of the pandemic started for knowledge workers across the world.

22:08And so the first call I had was at 9 a.m. on a Sunday morning with the senior team that I had inherited at Thomson Reuters. And the question on the table was, should we ask 25 ,000 people to work from home starting tomorrow? and we of course decided the answer to that was yes as did most firms and we navigated that very very successfully however at the time you know I was asking questions like well do we have a Microsoft Teams or a Zoom license how old are the laptops I was going to say because obviously it meant you had to focus on technology as much as anything else and I think and you're going to explain to me now that one of the most important tasks you've had at Thomson's Reuters is turning this stunning intellectual capability and this stunning number of thousands of very, very smart employees, whether it's tax, audit, legal, news, what have you, into a technology company.

23:07Is that the biggest part of your role? And has that been the biggest part of your decision making? Yeah. I mean, we set out to do two things. One, go from what was basically a portfolio or holding company to an operating company. And there's real scale across the different technology applications and the platforms that we build and maintain. And the second part was to go from predominantly content to content-driven technology, as we called it. And that second part, I always think the hardest part in most CEOs' job is not to figure out necessarily the sort of direction of travel, but it's the speed of travel.

23:46So you do not want to move too slowly and be left behind, but you also don't want to move so fast that the organization sort of cracks beneath you or around you. And so the direction of travel was we're going to become a technology company and we're going to be the world's best innovator in serving these fiduciary professions, tax and audit and legal news and risk and compliance. The question was, how fast can we go? And I think there was a moment where I thought, look, our employees as employees all over the world are under tremendous stress, tremendous personal stress at home. Are they well?

24:26Are their families, are their kids and their parents and everyone around them well in the face of this complete unknown pandemic. And the question was, well, should we sort of hold back a little bit in this transition? But the more time I spent with our customers, the more I realized we don't have a choice here because the customers are going to take this opportunity to also work from home. They're going to take this opportunity to rapidly accelerate a shift to the cloud. And if we take a pause, by the time the pandemic finishes, we will be three laps of the track behind. And so we actually went as fast as we possibly could.