Ownership Drives Transformation

Something changes when people stop thinking like business leaders and start thinking like owners.

When we prepared to separate the Financial & Risk business from Thomson Reuters and create Refinitiv, I gathered the leadership team in New York. The proposed deal with Blackstone had been kept extremely tight, and most of the team knew nothing about it.

Once the initial shock had subsided, the mood changed remarkably quickly, and the team could see the opportunity in front of us. We were going to have an investor that understood the business, wanted to invest in it and would give us the freedom to move faster.

But I wanted the team to understand a bigger change. This wasn't somebody else's business any more. It was ours.

Think like an owner. That sounds like a small distinction, but it isn't.

For years, many of us operated within a much larger organisation. We ran our part of it, argued for investment and tried to make good decisions, but ultimately we were lieutenants. Refinitiv required a different mindset. If something wasn't working, nobody else was to blame. If an investment needed to be made, we had to decide whether it was worth making. If bureaucracy got in the way, it was now our bureaucracy. And if we succeeded, we would share in that success.

We took that last point literally. With Blackstone's encouragement, members of the leadership team invested more than $10 million of their own money in Refinitiv. They genuinely had skin in the game.

Behaviour follows ownership, and ownership changes the questions people ask.

Instead of “Is this within my budget?”, the question becomes “Is this the best use of our money?”

Instead of “Who approved this process?”, it becomes “Why do we have this process at all?”

Instead of protecting your own part of the organisation, you start thinking about the value of the whole.

Financial ownership can be a powerful mechanism for creating that mindset, but the broader lesson goes beyond equity.

People need agency. They need to feel they can shape the outcome rather than simply execute somebody else's transformation programme. That was one of Refinitiv's defining characteristics. We invited people into the process, gave leaders real responsibility and expected them to act.

Transformation works best when the people delivering it don't merely understand the change.

They believe in it.

They build it.

And, in one form or another, they own it.