Читать книгу Character is Destiny - Pehr Gyllenhammar - Страница 10

Truth: from Old English triewe (West Saxon), treowe (Mercian) “faithful, trustworthy, honest, steady in adhering to promises, friends, etc.,” from Proto-Germanic *treuwaz “having or characterized by good faith” (source also of Old Frisian triuwi, Dutch getrouw, Old High German gatriuwu, German treu, Old Norse tryggr, Danish tryg, Gothic triggws “faithful, trusty”), from PIE *drew-o-, a suffixed form of the root *deru“be firm, solid, steadfast.”

—Oxford English Dictionary

My relationship with the Reuters Group dates back to 1984, the year it was floated as a public company in London, when I was first asked to join the board of directors of Reuters Holdings, PLC. My long-standing affinity for commitment to integrity made Reuters—with its mandate to adhere to the Trust Principles of ethics established in 1941—a very appealing institution. In advance of the flotation, it was decided that three non-press directors should be added to the board—one American, one British, and one European (since, as we have now been informed, Britain is not part of Europe). The board approved the addition of US Citicorp chairman Walter Wriston, UK chairman of Courtaulds Christopher Hogg, and me (then CEO of Volvo) representing the rest of Europe. A new entity—named the Reuters Founders Share Company Ltd.—was formed, and the new corporate charter specified that the board of directors be charged with overseeing that the company continue to adhere to the original Trust Principles, specifically:

1 1.That Thomson Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group, or faction;

2 2.That the integrity, independence, and freedom from bias of Thomson Reuters shall at all times be fully preserved;

3 3.That Thomson Reuters shall supply unbiased and reliable news services to newspapers, news agencies, broadcasters, and other media subscribers and to businesses, governments, institutions, individuals, and others with whom Thomson Reuters has or may have contracts;

4 4.That Thomson Reuters shall pay due regard to the many interests which it serves in addition to those of the media; and

5 5.That no effort shall be spared to expand, develop, and adapt the news and other services and products so as to maintain its leading position in the international news and information business.

At that time in the 1980s, Reuters had enjoyed a reputation as one of the world’s leading news agencies for over a century. Renowned as much for its commitment to incorporating the newest technologies as for its integrity, Reuters’ beginnings were characterized by ingenious strategies devised to work around shortcomings and inconsistencies in the existing communications network.

On October 17, 1851, engineers of the Submarine Telegraph Company successfully completed laying the first functional submarine communications cable across the English Channel. That same evening, the first electronic message between England and France was transmitted and received. It was an accomplishment significant enough to merit the immediate conveyance of the message to the Queen and to the Duke of Wellington.

Shortly thereafter, Paul Julius Reuter arrived in London to open a transmission service to convey stock quotes to and from Paris using the new Calais-Dover cable. His focus on finding ways to allow for the rapid communication of accurate information was already well established. News agencies were regularly sending stories via overland telegraph cables in Europe, but in 1850 the line of connections from one side of the continent to the other still contained gaps. Reuter came up with the idea of bridging the telegraph gap between Brussels and Aachen by using carrier pigeons. Up until this time, the most reliable prevailing method of bridging the gap was to send messages by train, an eight-hour journey. Reuter’s birds could make the same seventy-six-mile journey in an impressive two hours. His pigeon post remained the fastest method of disseminating the news until the Belgium-Germany telegraph gap was closed in April of 1851. Mindful of ongoing plans to establish a telegraph connection between England and France, Reuter relocated to London, financial capital of the world.

Over the course of several decades, the name Reuter became synonymous with rapid news circulation, in large part due to Paul Julius Reuter’s continued focus on finding ways to speed the dissemination of news after its arrival from the United States, a country that would not have a lasting cable connection with Europe until 1856. News traveled eastward from America’s east coast across the Atlantic via steamer, taking an average of about nine days to reach Europe. Reuter hired men to work as lookouts posted near Crookhaven Harbor on Ireland’s southwestern coast. These lookouts scanned the horizon for the approach of mail-carrying steamships. By arrangement, whatever steamship happened to be carrying mail from Reuter’s US news agent, Associated Press, would turn on a blue signal light when they neared the Irish coast. As soon as a blue-lit steamer came within view of one of the lookouts, the crew on Reuter’s own tender Marseilles would be alerted to intercept the inbound steamship. Also by previous arrangement, the purser on the incoming steamer would pack all mail addressed to Reuter in watertight canisters, which were tossed overboard to be retrieved with nets by the Marseilles crew.

Getting hold of incoming US news before anyone else provided no advantage unless it could also be circulated to and across Europe. Reuter had a system for that, too. He purchased a private cable connection between Crookhaven and Cork, some seventy miles to the northeast. Time-sensitive news retrieved by the Marseilles from the floating containers was telegraphed from Crookhaven, and from Cork it was retransmitted to London. In this way, breaking news from Reuter arrived in the London telegraph a minimum of several hours before the same mail steamer that carried it across the Atlantic could reach Liverpool. These details are telling in giving an idea of the lengths and expense Paul Julius Reuter was willing to go to in order to ensure he had the earliest possible access to transatlantic news and be the first European source of developing news stories. This was far more than merely a nominal accomplishment, as evidenced by Reuters breaking the news story of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, an event that in addition to its social and political import had a direct effect on the financial market.

Over the next several decades, Reuters expanded across European countries, and ultimately across continents, following the growing telegraph-accessible locations to the Far East and South America. In 1923, the agency became the first to send stock quotes via radio, transmitting them from London to Europe in Morse code. Reuters remained consistent in placing a priority on incorporating the newest technologies into their communications network, adopting the teleprinter to distribute stories to newspapers throughout London, and reinventing their own position in the market with the introduction of the computerized Reuters Stockmaster real-time price retrieval system in 1964. In 1973, President Nixon dismantled the Bretton Woods Agreement, which had obliged member nations to establish a fixed rate of external exchange by linking the rate to the gold standard. Reuters anticipated the widespread effects of the “Nixon shock” by creating and launching the Reuter Monitor Money Rates Services—an international foreign exchange network. The Reuter Monitor enabled contributing institutions to input their exchange rates and allowed subscribers to retrieve and view on video display terminals all of the participating banks’ exchange rates for each currency—information that had never before been accessible from a single source.

I was pleased and optimistic about joining the Reuters board, and remained longer than almost anyone else. When I felt it was time for me to move on, I gave my notice. I did not expect the response I received. “Pehr,” I was told, “you cannot leave the family. We would like to propose instead that you become a board member of our Founders Share Company.” I found that I did see Reuters as a family of sorts, and so I accepted that proposal, and several months later was asked to become chairman of the Founders Share Company board.

During the course of my three five-year terms on the FSC board, my high esteem for the company never faltered. It marked a significant part of my life, as I took very seriously the task of overseeing the company and ensuring that the Trust Principles were upheld and respected in the company’s conduct. In their essence, the principles are independence, integrity, and freedom from bias. Both the principles themselves and the importance of safeguarding them truly spoke to me. The model Reuters established appealed to my belief in the great importance of both ethical standards in the corporate world, and in the need to protect the free press, regardless of what that entailed. At times this even necessitated intervening in the actions of another director. When board member Rupert Murdoch went over the 15 percent ownership threshold for outside shareholders, for example, it was my responsibility to step in and directly challenge Murdoch’s actions. I will admit that after telling him it was unacceptable to pass the threshold and informing him that he must sell down, I held my breath to see if he would simply tell me to go to hell. But after several days, he did sell down, reducing his company shares to the appropriate and authorized amount.

After the end of my third five-year term (and having passed the three-term time limit) I was happy to accept the position of chairman of the board of the Founders Share Company and continue into the next decade with Reuters. I wanted to do everything in my power to keep the company on its course. It was a powerful and occasionally humbling experience to observe the many ways—great and small—in which the Reuters people evaluated and sometimes adjusted their own actions to ensure that they were in keeping with the Trust Principles.

On the evening of September 11, 2001, as a shaken world absorbed the news of the devastating terror attacks in the United States, David Wenig, Reuters president of Investment Banking and Brokerage Services, requested that the large electronic billboards outside of Reuters’ London office display an image of the American flag, to communicate England’s solidarity with America. Feedback came in from a number of editorial managers asking that the flag be removed, as it could be construed to be an indication of bias. I happened to be in New York on that day, visiting the Lazard financial management firm in my capacity as their senior advisor and managing director.

I had arrived at Lazard’s Rockefeller Center office quite early in the morning, and a colleague and a secretary were the only other people in the sixty-second-floor office. It was an absolutely beautiful day, cool and clear, the skyline of the city crisp and vivid against the bright blue sky. On one of the television monitors, I heard the breaking news that a plane had just hit a Manhattan skyscraper. The southern-facing exposure of the Lazard offices provides a bird’s-eye view of Manhattan from the East River to the Hudson. After hearing the news, my colleague and I went to the window from which we could clearly see a vast plume of brown smoke pouring from the north tower of the World Trade Center. At that moment, we saw a second plane approaching rapidly from the southwest. We stood shoulder to shoulder watching with disbelief as the plane hit the south tower, sending a massive fireball shooting into the sky. I don’t believe either of us spoke—what was there to say? The sight was so dramatic—so viscerally brutal—it is virtually impossible to convey to anyone who did not see it with their own eyes.

After the towers collapsed, the scene in lower Manhattan was one of utter devastation, and the scale of human suffering unbearable. I was not only deeply shaken by what I had seen, I was not at all sure that more attacks were not on the way. I had no intention of getting into the elevator to descend sixty-two floors, so I remained where I was. My colleague followed suit. At about 11 a.m., I heard voices and saw several policemen entering the office. They seemed surprised to see us, as the building had been closed off and no one was supposed to be inside. My colleague and I took the sixy-two-floor elevator ride in silence, emerging in the plaza with no idea where to go or what to do. Like countless others, I was marooned, unable to travel out of the city. I followed the events surrounding the London Reuters’ office and the American flag by telephone from my hotel. I was both touched by their impulse to display solidarity and impressed with their difficult decision to take the flag down. To me, it represented the pinnacle of integrity, and embodied everything I admired about the organization.

In an internal newsletter dated September 19, 2001, Wenig discussed the painful decision to comply and remove the flag, saying, “It was and is clear on reflection that the ideals of independence and objectivity go to the heart of what we are as a company. These pillars cannot be selectively retracted when we feel passion, or when we believe that right and wrong are so plainly clear. In fact, the trust principles are reinforced most powerfully when they are stretched and challenged the furthest.”

This was a remarkable demonstration of what it takes to protect ethical principles in a corporate world. The Trust doesn’t pose a burden of expense or bureaucracy on the corporation, but it does preclude prioritizing profits over everything else. The fact of Reuters’ longevity as a company is evidence that with a long-term view, the Trust Principles have served the institution extremely well. It is also a clear indication of the clarity of vision and flexibility of mind of the Trust founders, not dissimilar to that of the authors of the US Constitution—anticipating in the extreme long term the needs and obstacles of the company—creating a structure of preservation that is neither too specific nor too broad, but that will safeguard the principles without compromising the company’s ability to operate, expand, and adapt to the times.

For all its core ethos and latitude, the Trust is by no means immutable—human vigilance and foresight remain crucial to its safekeeping. In Michael Nelson’s memoir Castro and Stockmaster: A Life in Reuters, the company’s former general manager writes, “The Founders Share became vulnerable every time the protracted agenda over an EU Takeover Directive fired up again. The call for ‘one share one vote,’ if carried, could have wiped it out. We pressed the case that the Founders Share should be viewed as a qualitative rather than economic instrument, designed to protect Reuters core values, but having no economic value of its own. In this way, we sought to distinguish it from the majority of ‘golden shares’ designed to uphold the interests of a particular person, family, or other grouping.”

I can only hope that the unbroken line of individuals that have carried the torch of the principles forward year after year will continue indefinitely. What is at stake is more than just a corporate ethos and goes beyond even the imperative of preserving the value of media organizations. Lack of integrity—and a media that does not stick to good journalistic practice—can create a very dangerous situation for the rest of the world. America felt the full extent of journalism’s power when Katharine Graham and two of her Washington Post reporters had the courage and tenacity to investigate the Watergate break-in to its culmination—resulting in the downfall of the president himself. But over forty years later, the country is reeling from the one-two punch of an assault on the free press and the prevalence of television “news” shows that are thinly disguised propaganda machines. For every just force, there is an opposing unjust force, and the power to vanquish a corrupt president can manifest as the power to protect one.

The present struggle over the freedom of the press and the maintenance of truth in reporting and disseminating the news can be traced back at least as far as the period between the World Wars in the twentieth century, when governments threatened to take control of information. In 1941, Reuters took strong measures to prevent being taken over (specifically by the British government); it was then that the Reuters Trust was formed and Trust Principles put in place. In the 1980s another kind of crisis arose: the danger that information might be taken over by the superwealthy. If there is cynicism in the belief that anything and anyone can be bought, it is only because it happens with increasing frequency.

At the heart of these issues is the preservation of truth—of conscience itself—by maintaining the independence of the means of producing and disseminating information. A September 2017 Reuters US poll found that national confidence in the American press had risen to 48 percent, up from 39 percent the previous year. That is grounds for cautious optimism, but it is still only one small step back from the brink. Trust is crucial, but there must also be the means for self-correction from within each media institution, a way to preserve and protect the company, the press, and the public simultaneously.

It is interesting to consider Reuters’ reaction to the onslaught—against both the news business and the truth itself—coming from Washington. On September 18, 2017, Reuters editor in chief Steven Adler introduced a project called “The Trump Effect: Tracking the Impact of the President’s Policies.” He wrote, “Shortly after Donald J. Trump became U.S. president last January, I wrote a memo to the Reuters staff providing guidance on how to cover the new Administration. The gist was that we should proceed as we would with any leader in the world, whether that leader admired journalists or viewed them as the enemy. That meant trying not to take sides or to make ourselves the story but rather to work dispassionately on behalf of Reuters users, who would need honest, carefully sourced, vigorous reporting on what this presidency meant for them.” He continued by explaining that the Trump Effect would present hard data, video and text stories, and interactive graphics that would demonstrate—for better or worse—prevailing administration policies. The project has a dedicated website and is available to anyone, free of charge. The Trump Effect may be the closest thing the US (and the rest of the world) has to a single source of unbiased American political news.

In early 2018, I was unhappy to learn that the board of the Thomson Reuters Corporation had voted to approve a strategic partnership with the private equity firm Blackstone, which would entail Reuters selling Blackstone a 55 percent majority stake in its Financial & Risk unit. In the filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, the details of the venture included the makeup of a new consociation: “The new partnership will be managed by a 10-person board composed of five representatives from the Investors and four from Thomson Reuters. The President and CEO of the new partnership will serve as a non-voting member of the board following the closing of the transaction. At the closing of the proposed transaction, F&R and Reuters will sign a 30-year agreement for Reuters to supply news and editorial content to the new partnership. Under the agreement, F&R will pay Reuters a minimum of US$325 million annually. For the duration of the news contract, Thomson Reuters will grant F&R a license to permit F&R to brand its information feeds and products/services with the ‘Reuters’ mark.”

I had a fairly bad first impression of the Blackstone deal, and was not apprised of how it developed. I see private equity firms like Blackstone as slaughterhouses. They are designed to seek companies that are not well managed, that cannot exploit their own potential, or are floundering for some other reason. A company like that is a sitting duck if a private equity firm goes after it. Thomson Reuters indicated that they would use some of the purchase price from Blackstone to pay off an estimated $3 billion of debt and would use the lion’s share of the remaining money to “repurchase shares via a substantial issuer/bid/tender offer made to all common shareholders.” While I understand the lure of the deal when the money is on the table, it is one’s attitude toward the future that ultimately determines how to proceed. If that attitude is pessimistic, with no courage and belief in the future, going with the money on the table is the next step. But if the attitude is confident, with an entrepreneurial spirit that is encouraged by Blackstone’s interest, then the next step is to garner sufficient confidence to reject the offer and secure a loan to pay down the debt. I believed Thomson Reuters should have had that confidence. Apparently, they did not.

I was relieved when I learned the specifics of the deal, which make it very clear that the ownership of Reuters is still within Thomson Reuters. Technically, what Blackstone is doing is leasing the use of Reuters’ news and editorial content. The term of this lease is thirty years, which might as well be an eternity. But nonetheless, the ownership has not been ceded to Blackstone, which is what I originally feared was the case. Reuters remains in charge of managing the news, and Blackstone cannot change or manipulate it. We shall see how it goes. But I don’t like it.

In the face of overwhelming global pessimism (and growing cynicism), I nonetheless remain optimistic about the future. In taking a reckoning of the power for good, it is clear that sometimes a single force is enough to accomplish a Herculean task. In the case of the Watergate cover-up, uncovering the tentacles that snaked through the White House and reached all the way to the Oval Office—the force of the Washington Post was enough. But it was not a legacy of righting wrongs that gave the Post its power—it was the active support and guidance of Katharine Graham and her editor in chief, Ben Bradlee, both of whom were steadfast in their requirement that Woodward and Bernstein uphold the highest journalistic standards, and who were unflinching in their courage in publishing the results of their reporters’ investigation, in spite of the exceptional potential for negative backlash.

In the final pages of Castro and Stockmaster, Michael Nelson writes, “Pehr Gyllenhammar had acquired for the trustees a standing which was unthinkable when I worked for the Company. Reuters was fortunate that, when Thomson sought to buy Reuters, the Chairman of Trustees was a man of such vision as Pehr Gyllenhammar, who had become Chairman in 1999… I derived some satisfaction from the fact that I had introduced Gyllenhammar to the Reuter family.”

Having put in twenty-seven years as a member of that Reuter family, I can think of no more welcome validation than the suggestion that my own affinity for integrity affected Reuters in the same way that they affected me. It is a privilege to have worn the mantle of principle for so long, and if I have passed that mantle on to someone else, then all that I hoped to accomplish at Reuters has come to pass. I hope the next generation of directors will be able to say the same.