Books
Nature and nurture
28.02.08 Liz Bury
Annette Thomas, chief executive of Macmillan, will be unknown to many in the general book industry. The 43-year-old mother of four, an American by birth and a biologist by training, has taken over the top job at the £400m-plus Macmillan Group after eight years running its science publishing division, Nature.
This isn't the first time that Thomas has made such a change. At the point she became m.d. of Nature Publishing Group (NPG), she was still a relatively junior manager. "It was the only time in my whole life I've been speechless," she says of the moment when former Macmillan c.e.o. Richard Charkin and his boss Stefan von Holtzbrinck offered her the Nature role. "It was a huge surprise to me and also to many people in the company."
Until then, Thomas had been "working away in the basement on my journals", she recalls. "I came from an editorial background. I had a science degree. I had never had significant responsibility for P&L [profit and loss]. I had only managed a team of 15 people. I was 35. To make that transition to a company like NPG, which was about 400 people with a huge amount of business in the USA and Asia, was a significant move." Both Charkin and von Holtzbrinck "like taking a risk", she observes.
Risky business
In fact, Thomas has a top-flight scientific background. She spent four years in a research laboratory at Yale, completing a PhD in cell biology and neurobiology, after a degree in biochemistry and biophysics from Harvard.
She joined Macmillan in 1993 as an editor at Nature, after rejecting the research scientist's career path. She was soon selected as founding editor of Nature Cell Biology, and then launched a suite of journals, the Nature Reviews.
Charkin's gamble paid off: NPG grew from 10 to 70 titles and from 400 to 800 people, with sales up to £104m in 2006. It has transformed from a print-based operation to an innovative digital business.
"We realised we had a fantastic opportunity with Nature to exploit the digital medium," Thomas says. "It was not just about creating a magazine or a book. We asked: 'How do you think about a scientist in 360 degrees? What do they do? What is their workflow like? What can we do to enable them to be more successful?' It was about trying to envelop that whole environment."
Nature.com is now among the biggest science platforms, site licences are routinely used by institutions, and new research service Nature Precedings has been established. Two years ago, a daring business model was also introduced, making it free to post recruitment ads, with revenue driven from services associated with the jobs database. It is now the clear market leader.
Along the way, Thomas had four children, now aged 12, 11, three and one. She starts work at 6.30 a.m. every day and leaves at 5 p.m. sharp, "because I've got three hours with my kids". She takes all her holidays "religiously", and has a "clear sense of personal time versus work time". But this can sometimes blur: "I was on the BlackBerry during my last delivery. I found that, when in labour, it's a good distraction."
As the first female c.e.o. of Macmillan, Thomas anticipates no particular change of culture, although half-term weeks are now off-limits for forecasting meetings with the accounts department. "Richard [Charkin] and I are actually very similar personalities," she says. "I'm a bit more impatient than he is: impatient but in an aspirational way for the company."
Being a German speaker is a bonus in meetings with the Holtzbrinck board, although "it’s a bit of a stretch", says Thomas, who learned the language as a child visiting her German grandmother.
She grew up in the US, where her unusual background—an African-American father and German mother—meant she was continually asked "rude" questions. "You have to have a much stronger sense of self earlier on, because otherwise other people will define you rather than you defining yourself." She prefers Britain's "nonchalant" approach to people's origins. "Here it's just not an issue," she says.
Her empire now spans five divisions: NPG; Palgrave; Macmillan Education; fiction and non-fiction in the UK and the rest of the world; and publishing services. Her "aspiration" for Macmillan is to speed up digital innovation across the businesses, drawing on "centres of excellence". These include Palgrave, which in May launches The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics in print and online, and Macmillan Education, with its Macmillan English Campus online products. "I want to accelerate the transfer of information around the group, with people if necessary."
Pan's people
At UK trade arm Pan Macmillan, she promises further investment, possibly in acquisitions to follow children’s non-fiction house Kingfisher. "It is a difficult market, not straightforward, but we will be developing our strategy there and you will see more investments," she says.
She points to the possibilities of using the web to attract new authors, via schemes such as Macmillan New Writing. "The digital medium gives the opportunity to meet more potential authors, and you can provide a richer environment for them than with a bricks-and-mortar approach."
In replacing Picador publisher Andrew Kidd, two senior positions will be created, one to focus on literary fiction and the other on general fiction. "We're just turning up the volume a bit at Pan Macmillan," she says. Thomas quickly instigated a review of Macmillan Education, unifying the global management structure under new c.e.o. Julian Drinkall after the departure of longstanding chairman Chris Paterson. "Previously, education was managed in different pieces, so we're bringing it together," she says.
Thomas now hopes to build on "the culture that Richard put into place [which] was so conducive to sharing information". Proving that you can take the girl out of biological research, but not biology out the girl, she adds: "One of the defining characteristics of Macmillan is that the workforce is very fluid. We’ve had many staff move between the different parts of the organisation. Part of our job is to create the right environment, give it plenty of water and nutrients, and see what grows."
RSS
Subscriber Content