CEO steps down after evolving Reed from "dusty print publisher"

Sir Crispin Davies, who is stepping down from multinational publisher Reed Elsevier next week, says that when he took over as the CEO ten years ago, he quickly came to understand that Reed had to evolve from being “a dusty print publisher” to become an online information provider: “The key decision was: do we follow or do we lead [our customers online],” Sir Crispin recalls in a wide-ranging interview with the Financial Times.

Reed is now still a print publisher, but, like Thomson-Reuters has evolved into principally a digital information provider in science and medical fields, legal, education and business.

Not all of the change that Davies presided over was easy, says the article, including changing the culture of the Anglo-Dutch firm, selling off the company's educational publishing assets (successfully) he had only just acquired and having to abandon an attempt to sell off the Reed Business Information trade magazine titles (because of a drastic drop in their valuation).

“In retrospect, we should have moved earlier but we really didn’t think we could sell both education and RBI well at the same time,” he says. “If we’d known that this downturn was going to happen, we may have said it was worth the risk.”