Tom Glocer has been celebrating the success of the three-year integration process that melded Thomson with Reuters. But the chief executive of the information and media group needs to beware overstating the value of its ownership model. In a recent Financial Times interview, he said that Thomson Reuters – 55 per cent of which belongs to a family investment company – had “what may become the defining corporate structure of the best institutions for the next 20 years”.
That big claim worries me. Few families are content to share their birthright with outside shareholders in a listed hybrid for long. More important, anyone who trusts specific corporate structures to do the job managers are paid to do is likely to be disappointed, or worse.
I get the same queasy feeling whenever I hear British politicians celebrate the John Lewis Partnership – the successful employee-owned department store chain – as a model for everything from the Post Office to the National Health Service. In a similar vein, the financial crisis has encouraged a think-tank fetish for proposing mutual, co-operative or partnership alternatives to the listed-company model used by broken retail or investment banks.