James Smith's vision

While judging past chief executives let me not leave Gerald Long unchallenged. His greatest achievements were no doubt to have decided to break with the Associated Press of America, which must have taken great courage, and to have persuaded the Reuter Board to approve the financing of the Reuter Monitor when that was only a project and of a scale Reuters had not previously countenanced. While we walked the streets of Paris visiting every café as we assembled the material for a historical CD-ROM we were producing jointly, Long asked me whether he had been right to nominate Glen Renfrew as his successor rather than Michael Nelson. He said he gave the full credit for Reuters success in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s to Nelson. I gave him a somewhat lame answer. I said I preferred Nelson’s philosophy of organic growth to Renfrew’s wish to grow the company by acquisition, which the New York analysts loved but which, it seemed to me, did not add to the company’s fundamental strengths. ■