https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-gilbert-manuel-823285

This interview is all around financial services and innovation. I was fortunate to be able to interview Katherine Manuel. Katherine is the Senior Vice President of Innovation at Thomson Reuters. As you probably know, Thomson Reuters is a huge financial services and information company. They operate in more than 100 countries. In 2015 they had $12.2 billion in revenue.

Katherine is in charge of innovation across this gigantic company. I invited her on the show because I was quite curious how she innovates and works with the many different product groups and industries such as pharma, financial, IP, legal.

Here are some other things we talk about:

-How do you work with the different product groups?
-How have you instilled an innovation mindset at Thomson Reuters?
-How did you develop and promote your internal venture fund?
-How do you determine if an innovation project was successful?

Transcript

David Kruse: Today we are lucky enough to have Katherine Manuel with us. Katherine is the Senior Vice President of Innovation at Thomson Reuters. Thomson Reuters probably doesn’t need much of an introduction, but it’s a huge financial service information company. They operate in more than 100 countries, and have more than 60,000 employees around the world and in 2015 they had $12.2 billion in revenue. So they are kind of large. So that’s Thomson Reuters and Katherine is in charge of Innovation across this gigantic company and I’m quite curious how she innovates and works with the many different project groups and industries such as pharma, financial, IP, legal. So I could probably spend an entire interview just listing to everything that Thomson Reuters does. So instead let’s hear more about Katherine and her background and how she came to be Head of Innovation. So Katherine, thanks for joining us today.

Katherine Manuel: My pleasure Dave. It’s nice to be here.

David Kruse: Definitely. And so first off let’s get to know you a little bit better. Can you just tell us a little bit about your background and then how that kind of transitioned in to becoming an Innovation Head at Thomson Reuters?

Katherine Manuel: Absolutely, absolutely. So after – as a very early undergrad from college I moved to New York City where I worked for what was then Andersen Consulting, now is Accenture, but doing both strategy and technology. I’d say for the two overlaps, there was a lot of overlap in the strategy works that we did and that was all really involved in technology in particular. It was back in early 90’s where it didn’t matter sort of what your background was. They could train you to do most anything if you showed the right attitude. And so I remember my first six weeks were in heavy coding school, where I had to learn how to program and really understand technology and it was a skill set that I had never really needed to tap into before. I had always done word processing and I had played around with spreadsheets. But never at this level and I found it really exciting and challenging. What I found the most exciting was the problems that the businesses through our customs, what types of problems they were trying to solve. Back then it was all around e-commerce and CRM systems, ways of reaching customers and call centers and it was sort of – now it seems so antiquated. There were solutions that were coming, but the problems were still the same and what’s been fascinating is watching that evolution of technology take place throughout my career. But kind of quickly I then went back to business school because I know I wanted to take a different step or kind of learn new tools to advance my career and following business school, soon following business school I joined the Thomson Corporation, which then became Thomson Reuters a few years later. I really focused on the strategy side at first and used all the skills that I had gained from consulting and strategy and problem solving, building on that business school, sort of typical business school, career around strategy consulting and then kind of through a number of different jobs or roles within the company and I got attracted back to technology, and through that process I became the Vice President of Technology Strategy and Enterprise Architecture for our Health Care and Science business, and it was sort of this – it was a really sweet molding of both my strategy and my technology. And I did that for a few years and then wanted change, and one of the things that I loved about Thomson Reuters and how big it is, and also the diversity of who we sell to, how we sell it, what we sell. The professionals that work within the walls of the company itself really provide opportunities to move around and to learn these skill sets and to apply these skill sets in very different industries and areas of the company. So I began to explore different roles in the company. I worked in our Chief of Staff for our CEO in a strategy role. I did a stint in communication, where I really focused on technology around communications and did some re-organization work and things like that. I then, I then had more of an opportunity to work in our CEOs office, working in strategy, working in the transformation office and then I was actually – I had a great role working in Corporate Strategy, really looking at the big shifts of the company and thinking about what is our long term five year goal with the whole organization, and in that role I got to do tremendous work just really understanding our market where things were moving globally and sort of where we needed to invest and put our resources. And then I guess I kind of finished a big piece of work and was asked to take on this innovation leader role, which I just feel like has really brought together many of the different experiences that I’ve had, both before I joined Thomson Reuters in my academic background and then in experience that I’ve had with the company, really bringing thing together and giving me the platform to create real change in the company.

David Kruse: You sound like the perfect person for the Innovation role, because it brings together so many different divisions and all of your past experiences. And I’m curious, out of those past experiences at Thomson Reuters is there one that you thought really helped your career the most or you learnt a lot or that you enjoyed the most.

Katherine Manuel: Trying to think, all of them. I mean in so many ways I’ve moved around so much. I think, so each role I’ve had, even though I did that technology strategy role for three years, each piece, kind of there were different organization shifts that took place within those three years. So I’ve never had a role last longer than a year or two before it’s made a major shift and I think that’s been probably – I don’t know if it’s any one particular role. I think each one has added or created different challenges that I needed to overcome and learn a lot from. But I think that what’s really shaped me is that being able to evolve and change and keep pushing my own learning and experience has been sort of that over arching greatest learning opportunity across the company.

David Kruse: Yes, that makes sense. And would you consider yourself a curious person?

Katherine Manuel: Very.

David Kruse: Very, it seems like it, I mean to want to keep moving and changing and moving up and then taking on this innovation role. And before we get too far, and I don’t know if I did a good enough job or not, but can you just give a brief description of Thomson Reuters, if you can give it brief, I don’t know if that’s possible, but…

Katherine Manuel: Yes, no, absolutely. I think we play as a marriage of content and technology in so many ways and the cool thing about us is now we are really overlaying this whole innovation piece around content and technology. So when I think about the area that we differentiate ourselves from some other really large companies that might also say they have content and technology, we go really deep in industry. So we have financial and risk, which is really focused on the financial service market. If I were to really streamline it and tell you that’s sort of the area of focus. We also have an enormous legal business, which sells content technology, solutions for both corporate, legal areas, as well as law firms and other sort of interested legal parties. And then we have a tax and accounting business which is really focused on those, again, the firm but also the corporate customs. And the interesting thing is that we hire and we staff professionals in those areas. So lot of times we bring in our own staff, to be tax and accounting professionals. They came from big firms or small firms. They used to own their own firms. We have lawyers. We have a whole – our call center in Eagan, Minnesota, which is just outside the Twin Cities. It’s staffed with lawyers who have searched and used west law for years and they now are the people that are helping the research assistance and librarians find the answers for layers. So there is a lot of really deep content expertise within those areas that truly differentiate both our solutions and the way we sell our products. And it’s probably why I like the company so much, there is certain Canadian roots to our company as well, and there is just this sort of, from a very – it’s probably a little bit of a generalization, but there is a real authenticity and a desire to do good work and to impress our customers by being a solid corporation that delivers, not what we say we are going to do.

David Kruse: Interesting, and you don’t always hear that, I’ve interviewed a lot of people, that doesn’t always come across. I like that. I can see why it’s a nice place to work.

Katherine Manuel: Absolutely.

David Kruse: Yes, so as Head of Innovation, where are some of your main priorities, because you have so many divisions to cover and so many people to talk to. How do you…?

Katherine Manuel: Yes. So the interesting thing about innovation and how we look at innovation across the company is innovation needs to happen everywhere. I’ll tell you just a little bit more about our history as a company, because I do think it’s important to understand that and know where we are coming at innovation from. But we had always been a very acquisition led growth company, and what I mean by that is, we did about 300 acquisitions in seven or eight years. So if you could imagine just the churn of bringing on new companies and divesting some companies, but really brining in those acquired companies into the frame. And at the end of 2013 we really kind of had – and this is when I was part of the corporate strategy team, but we had this realization that we needed to change the way that we were growing, and acquisitions weren’t working out for us in the same way as we looked towards the future. That that was not going to be our growth engine moving forward; rather we needed to make sense of the acquisitions we had already acquired. We needed to streamline our platforms, we needed to rationalize our content set, we needed to create greater leverage across the whole of our enterprise, but at the same time if we stopped all of our acquisitions, where is growth going to come, and that’s where my role really became so pivotal and that we needed to generate and kick start an entire innovation program to really shift not only the culture of the company, but how we thought about driving growth, whether it was top line growth in developing new products, creating new services, creating ways that we better sold to customs, but also things like how do we change the experience the customs have? How do we improve the way that we go to market and make things easier from a billing, retention, all of those aspects of go-to-market perspective of our products and then also operational efficiencies. So innovation can take many different views and we need to think about how do we innovate on our processes? How do we streamline things and make them more simple? So I tell you all of that, because then when you say what is your role in innovation; my role is to actually develop the technology, to come up with the next great product opportunity for us. My role is to unlock the intelligence of the resources we have across the company and give people a voice and kind of the perch to go out and build and create those new great ideas. So we’ve created many different processes and programs to generate innovation, to enable greater participation in innovation across the company at all different levels, and in all different functions. So it’s a very kind of broad agreement that we have to create real structure so that people know about how they can get involved and participate in what we are doing around innovation. So if there – I wish I could say, well now I like my role so much, but there are some days I wish I could say I’m focused on the innovation of virtual reality, but that’s not where I’m focused. I’m focused on understanding what is virtual reality? Who are the resources that understand it? How do we give them enough room, so that they can test and quickly try out different opportunity that might exist there with customs and give them kind of the free range to develop things in a safe and productive environment.

David Kruse: And this is kind of a science question, but that’s interesting. Can you share what you are doing in virtual reality?

Katherine Manuel: We are just doing some cool stuff. I mean some actually where some of our virtual reality has taken place, has been working with the Thomson Reuters Foundation. So we are – I think we did one like video and some of the new groups does things. I think that there was something around Carnival in Brazil, where they are just testing different technologies and figuring out how do we capture stories and share stories using that method. There is this kind of a group of people that we had to try out and test new things and figure out, are there any ways that this potentially would help advance some of our businesses and some of our customers experiences.

David Kruse: Interesting, okay. And I remember you wrote an article that I read about, how you said that innovation could come from anywhere and that it was actually a lot of creative – everyone is probably creative in their own right and there’s people in HR and legal, and so you mentioned that your processes in place to kind of help bring about innovation. Like can you talk about any of those processes that have helped kind of the innovation mind set at Thomson Reuters?

Katherine Manuel: Sure. Yes, one of the things is called the Catalyst Fund and it’s an innovation fund that I myself manage. Its directly – our executive sponsor is our CEO, Jim Smith. We need on a monthly basis anybody from across the organization can submit a proposal for an innovation idea. The one sort of trick that will make sure that there is some sort of oversight or sort of hurdle to just lead out some of the ideas is that people need to get a P&L sponsor or sort of a senior level sponsor that understands our customers, to at least say that they support us exploring this idea. And those teams then submit their ideas. We do have somewhat of a process to sort of, certain forms that they have to fill out. We go through all the forms, we help coach the teams on how to write and pitch their ideas. Then they get an audience with not only our CEO, but also about four or five of his direct reports who talk about the idea. That when they pitch it, there is a lot of discussions, questions around what the idea is and then they can get up to $100,000 to build a proof of concept. At that point, they go off. They can use that money, up to the $100,000 to build out that proof of concept. Then they come back to the Catalyst Fund and share if they think it was successful or not and they have the opportunity to then ask for more money, but this time it has to be, the funding has to be split between my fund and the business units sponsor. And that’s an additional chunk of money that they can fit into that and that would help to built out the prototype. And then from there it turns over to the business unit. It’s still kind of incubated and watched and tracked by us to give it a little bit of additional support, but we then track to see how the business unit adapts those ideas and they get in to market.

David Kruse: That’s great.

Katherine Manuel: That’s one of the programs that we have. We also have – we also do different workshops to drive different thinking around within experimentation. We do workshops around particular ideas like something like open data, link data; we have different workshops on Cognitive Computing. We have different workshops on particular ideas where we will bring people from across the enterprise, because we do tend naturally to be somewhat soloed and we try to get cross functional teams to comes together and share their resources, share what they have and think about new use cases and how we could go-to-market in new ways.

David Kruse: Interesting, those are creating. I like the fund, the Catalyst Fund and how – yes, that’s a nice process you are having worked through. And if the idea comes to fruition, does the person with the idea and its driving forward, do they get to lead the charge if they want or how does that work?

Katherine Manuel: If they, sorry.

David Kruse: Yes, if they come up with an idea and then you decide to go forward with it, do they get to kind of lead that new initiative based on that idea?

Katherine Manuel: Yes, they get to lead while we’ve noticed they certainly need to learn how to recruit a great team around them, because it ends up being an addition to their day job. And so we have often found that they need to have a cross functional team with project managements, technology resource and domain expertise and some content at that. So there is – teams learn really fast what it takes to have a sort of mini star-ups, but there is definitely ownership and stewardship of their idea and we don’t get involved in kind of taking an idea and running with it. It’s certainly they remain as the leader of that idea.

David Kruse: And is it almost like its own startups so that they are talking to customers and reaching out to potential partners through their process?

Katherine Manuel: Yes, absolutely.

David Kruse: Okay, interesting. That’s creative, I like that. So when did you guys start doing that?

Katherine Manuel: January of 2014. So the program has been place for 2.5 years.

David Kruse: Interesting. Have you had any ideas come to market through that?

Katherine Manuel: Yes, we’ve had a whole bunch of ideas come through. Some into market, some of them are more, what we call them experience innovation, but thinking about different ways of using the data that we have to go-to-market in smarter ways. Some of them are operational innovations around efficiencies, so we have sort of a smattering of different ideas. I think we’ve had 26 ideas come through all the stages of funding and maybe, I’m going to get this wrong, but I think like 10 or 12 that have actually gone to market and some of them are pretty, well significant – they are still early days, but we are seeing good trending on them.

David Kruse: Interesting, okay. Well and it just helps kind of embed that whole culture of innovation. Like people know that’s there and that you guys are supporting and you have the attention of the CEO and his direct reports and so that’s a big deal.

Katherine Manuel: One thing that’s sort of an interesting highlight that many people have asked me, as I talked to people of different companies about the fund is – and I think that these are really important aspects of how to drive something like this to be successful, but having that full engagement and support of the CEO, has been critical. Another aspect is we don’t ask for a business case up front. It’s very back of the envelope, it’s very high level flag of what the potential opportunity could be and huge ranges. Like $1 million to $10 million, $10 million to $100 million and $100 million dollars plus; it’s sort of in that. We keep it really broad, so that this is really an opportunity to find a quick way to learn. It doesn’t have to be – it’s a way of testing things. It’s not a way of kind of creating a really structured business case and then a very formal environment. It’s supposed to test and learn along the way and then refine our learning as we go or understanding as we go.

David Kruse: Interesting. Right and its important people who are brave enough to come forward with an idea and share and even if they get shot down.

Katherine Manuel: There is a huge cultural element to the program, because we are able to go around and lead workshops for people or hear a great idea that somebody pulls us aside and say hey, I’ve been thinking about this innovation for a while and we have an outlet to give them and to support them. So that’s I think an important, a very important part of this program.

David Kruse: Interesting, and so I’m curious how do you work with the different product groups? Like do you approach them or do they approach you or would you go to them and say hey, we have some ideas or is it more you kind of help facilitate – I mean it sounds like you help facilitate the innovation, but how is it structured so that you touch all the different product groups?

Katherine Manuel: Yes. I mean sometimes its – I think sometimes it’s push and sometimes its pull. So I felt like we hadn’t yet done enough in some of our global centers and so I’m going to China to learn more about what they’ve been doing around innovating and to share some of the resources that we have around innovation across the company. I think I’m actually going to be floored in how much they have taken and run with around the thought of innovation, but I have a lot to learn there. I think in some of our product groups some are more keen to be a part of this than others and so why that its making sure that the people that really want to be involved, they want to participate. They feel that they have the tools that are ready and they can just kind of use them and leverage them as needed. And then for those areas that are little bit more skeptical, it’s just spending more time with the teams and letting them know what the opportunities are and where the upside is for them if they want to get involved. So I think it depends, it depends across the board.

David Kruse: Okay. And you mentioned that international, and I didn’t think about this, but do you think over time there will be maybe across 100 different countries everyone has a very different view on how business is done or technology. Do you see ideas coming from across the world more and more, being integrated or…

Katherine Manuel: Yes, we do. I think that we need to do a better job there, because the language barrier is real. And so, I mean just – I mean just I’ll give you an example from a timing perspective. Our Australian team came up with a pitch, saying that they really wanted to come forward and pitch their ideas. Fabulous idea, really exciting, but its then that they had to get up at 3:00 am in order to make the Catalyst Fund meeting, and so there are challenges like that. I know in China there is always some hesitancy. People feel like oh, can you proof read it and make sure the English is good enough so that we can pitch in a really strong way. We provided the support that we can and some of those ideas are just killing. I mean we had one idea come through the Catalyst Fund and its revenue generating and in a few short months it’s pretty incredible. If we can tap into the right people and then show that they really understand the program and that if they have hesitancies of getting involved, how do we support them? How do we fly them from Australia into wherever the majority of the panel is stilling, so that they can be there face to face and on a normal – on a time zone that they can acclimate to and really feel that they are getting the most out of it. I think we need to do those things to truly feel and act like a global company that is driving innovation together.

David Kruse: Definitely. And how do you continue to gather new ideas from the different groups and employees across Thomson Reuters. Imagine at the beginning of the Catalyst Fund there is a lot of excitement, but how do you kind of sustain that innovation or the idea generation?

Katherine Manuel: We keep steering, I mean the highlights of what we are learning from the Catalyst Fund project and if we look at strictly the Catalyst Fund, I think we had a lot of ideas at the beginning and then as we started going through them, people are getting smarter about what really does a good idea look like early stages. And so I would say that, while the pipeline isn’t, we don’t have the same quantity of early stages, we probably have better quality for the most part. And I think there is always people that want to – they come up with a new idea. I mean we have, 50-somewhat thousand people. There is always new ideas and we ask for ideas. We lead these challenges where we’ll also, the way that we do innovation challenges, we’ll work with the team and say what’s the main issue that you have? Where is the customer paying point? Where is an issue in the organization, and then we will kind of host that as a challenge out to the organization and say can anybody come up with solutions for this challenge that we are seeing, and we’ll get ideas from all over the company that help create ideas and generate innovative ideas around solving a given problem. So that’s how we can also make sure that our innovation activity is really tied back to some of our strategic imperatives.

David Kruse: Okay, okay. And are there any certain technologies or ideas that you are especially excited about or maybe technologies coming in the future. This is kind of a broad question, but…?

Katherine Manuel: Yes, I would say a couple, a couple of it probably. Well, a few of it probably will get me the most excited. One would be Cognitive Computing. I think that that’s a really interesting area, if you look at overlay of content and technology. Another would be blog change, just because its early days and nobody really knows what’s going to happen, but there is a lot of interest in some of the biggest things around understanding it and innovating around it. And then probably third would be this whole idea of how do we sell in these market place formats. So I’m thinking about innovation as ways of going to market or developing tools and capabilities that impact and affect the customer business relationship or the B2B relationship in these market places that we are seeing that have become really disruptive and I think those three areas that I’m keenly passionate about.

David Kruse: And can you just describe what you mean by Cognitive Computing?

Katherine Manuel: Yes, so most people know about Watson and the jeopardy case right.

David Kruse: Yes.

Katherine Manuel: So thinking about that and the power of understanding data and computer learning in those ways and when you think about many of our products, we have content and technology that come together that solves people’s problems that provide answers for our customers, yet how do we do that in new ways to really make the computer that much smarter and help our customers and we need to be at the forefront of that.

David Kruse: Yes, yes. You guys have so much data, you can really take advantage of that space, that’s for sure. Interesting, okay. And I was also curious, how do you as the Head of Innovation like measure your goals or your outcomes, because it a little, it might be a little more grey area right. You’re not going to hit certain revenue number or sales number or produce this number of widgets. How do you measure what you’re doing?

Katherine Manuel: Yes, that’s a great question. We are a heavily metrics driven organization in general, and one of the things when I came into this role that I realized pretty quickly and then started kind of talking to people about was when you are creating a new initiative like this, all you have are leading indicators, there is not lagging indicators. You don’t know immediately if what you are doing is working or it’s not working. And the exciting thing about having been you know leading this function or helping support for this overall goal of it, when I was in corporate strategy, was beginning – now we are beginning to see some of the lagging indicators. So we trap a lot of metrics around ideas in where globally we are finding reach and people are excited about things. We do surveys. You know from a cultural perspective there is lots that we can gather. We can gather a lot around who’s being trained from an internal perspective and different levels of sort of an innovation learning, but then also now we’ve begun to see where we are having either bottlenecks in our process around innovation, because we are able to see sort of the way that the pipeline is working and we can generate trends around what ideas are getting to market? What’s the nature of those ideas? What ideas seem really good, but they are not able to be adopted into the business unit and getting into market? Why is that? What do we need to change about the way that we are organized or the way that we think about launching new products to enable those processes to be more streamlined? So we capture quite a – I want to say it like – I don’t – not even going to quote the number of metrics that we capture on a quarterly basis, but many of them now are more lagging indicators, so that we are able to see the revenue uplift of some of these incubated projects and what’s happening there.

David Kruse: Yes, that makes sense.

Katherine Manuel: Even customer adoption.

David Kruse: Yes, yes, yes. These new ideas that you are kind of bringing to the market, that’s – I’ve talked to other Head of Innovations and they don’t necessarily have that, but that’s pretty powerful from at least your perspective, to be able to show that you actually are – I mean, and generate new, fresh revenue, it’s not easy. So to do that is impressive. It just kind of snowballs or it can go over…

Katherine Manuel: Well, it’s hard to. I mean I wish, we still have a long way to go, but I think we are making traction or we’re moving in the right direction.

David Kruse: Yes, sounds like it. And so we are getting near to the end of the interview, but a couple more questions. One is, all right, so a lot of this is internal focus which makes sense. Are you still looking for external partners to work with or is it mainly internal focus right now?

Katherine Manuel: Absolutely. No external partnerships are incredibly important to our growth. So I think historically again we’ve acquired growth and we didn’t focus and we always had the internal innovation and technology teams and R&D and teams that were doing some things. But now they are sort of a much larger push. There is also a huge push around partnership. So start ups are doing – they are able to move a lot faster. They are able to understand new technology specifically. They are on the forefront of really capturing some of the biggest shifts that are going on globally right now. And we have to learn from them, we need to partner with them. Because what we are good at is talking those technologies and scaling the heck out of them. So how do we look at our strength and their strength and marry them together in a way that’s beneficial to those, this startup as well as our company, when we necessarily don’t want to acquire them anymore and they don’t necessarily want to be acquired by us. So there is sort of an interesting role there or evaluating there about our company and I think the way that a lot of big companies are looking at startups. And also universities. If we think about most big research universities now have a arm to them around developing technology and spinning it off, and how do they license it, how do they create those relationships. We need to be really strong, have some strong partnerships with the right universities that we can work with. And so we are certainly going down that path and have been going that down that path for quite a while now.

David Kruse: Okay. Are there certain technologies or areas that you are especially interested in and I suppose each business unit would probably have their own answers, but I thought I’d just ask to see if you had any answer to that as well.

Katherine Manuel: Yes. I’d say things like Syntax broadly, right, so financial technology, certainly things like predictive analytics, are really interesting. Anything around sort of big data, visualization, I mean there is so much. We had someone that’s really focused on understanding the startup eco system and who is doing what and then figuring out which business units would benefit from learning more about those different startups. And that’s been a huge asset to us as a company to have somebody that really can understand the value that the start-ups are creating and then also make sure that they are connected with the right people across the organization.

David Kruse: Yes, that’s smart having that person. Interesting, okay. And so last question which is going to be two questions, but maybe you can pick which one you’d rather answer. One question is, what’s one or two major mistakes you’ve made and what have you learnt from them or these are – both of them are personal. It sounds like a good way to end the interview. Or you have been at Thomson Reuters for a long time, moved through different divisions. Has there been certain mentors there outside of Thomson Reuters that have really helped in your career moving along.

Katherine Manuel: Yes, I’m happy to answer either of those.

David Kruse: All right or you can do both, I mean you can do both.

Katherine Manuel: Yes, I can do the mentor one for sure. So I have been fortunate enough to have many great people that I’ve worked for, both at the company and prior to coming to the company. I have a particular mentor that has become just a dear friend but still remains on the pedestal as a mentor and she works at Thomson Reuters. And what I have been so fortunate around that is that there is sort of the bleeding of personal relationship as well as professional relationships, but its helped a lot. Because as you move up in your career, you tend not to get the real direct and frank feedback that you need, continue to evolve and continue to learn because people become less and less willing to kind of give you that feedback, and it’s really helpful to have someone who is willing to give you that feedback and the guidance and also understand who you are as this person to help, to help coach you and guide you and knows your hot buttons and also knows where you really have huge opportunity to drive and deliver. Even those people that you can call up when you are negotiating a new role and they’ll talk to you and they’ll think it through in the best way of handling things. I think that we all need people like that, at least I have and I’ve really benefited from one particular relationship, but then also I mean countless other relationships that just really great people that I’ve learnt from and who have taken an interest and pride in watching my career, continue to progress and move on.

David Kruse: Yes, I really like the answer, especially the one of feedback. You don’t always think about that as you move up and sometimes people aren’t as blunt on the feedback and I guess you have to be willing to accept it too. But you exposed yourself to lots of new roles, so like you must – like you said you are curious, but you must also be open to feedback and learning, which is why you are where you are right now.

Katherine Manuel: Yes, I won’t lie. It sometimes stings, the feedback. I think you still need it to evolve and move ahead.

David Kruse: Yes exactly. It’s one of the best ways to grow probably.

Katherine Manuel: Absolutely.

David Kruse: So I think that just about does it, unfortunately, but this has been awesome. So Katherine, I definitely appreciate you coming on the show and talking to us and I learnt a lot about what you are doing in Thomson Reuters and it’s a – I love what you are doing. So thanks for sharing and telling us more about your background and what you’re doing now.

Katherine Manuel: Excellent. Well, thank you for the time and the nice conversation.

David Kruse: Definitely, and thanks everyone for listening to another episode of Flyover Labs and I appreciate you listening and we’ll see you next time. Buy everyone.