Philip Green is not a man to shy away from a challenge and his position as chief operating officer of Reuters should provide him with plenty, writes Una McCaffrey

You get the feeling that Reuters chief operating officer Mr Philip Green enjoys making life difficult for himself. Last year, he set off with 12 colleagues to climb Tanzanian mountain Kilimanjaro, the tallest freestanding peak in the world. He had no previous climbing experience and his wife thought he was "completely mad" to even consider the project - a week-long mountain trek covering 100 miles without the luxury of running water or sanitation.

Without any obvious sense of understatement, Mr Green describes the exercise as a good team-building project. While a trip up an African mountain certainly puts a night at the bowling alley to shame, it is an extreme way for workmates to get to know each other, particularly when they had to pay for the trip themselves.

For Mr Green, the difficulties were by far outweighed by the week of "great fun".

Fun is something that the 48-year-old Englishman claims to have a lot of in his life, despite - or as a result of - his current status at the top level of a global giant in a state of troubled change.

Reuters, the 150-year-old information provider, is in the process of axing a 1,800-strong swathe of a total workforce of about 20,000. The move, part of the company's "business transformation programme" (BTP), is a response to difficult trading conditions over the past few years.

Last year, the BTP (Mr Green prefers to call it "management") cost £246 million sterling (€403 million) between staff cuts and the closure of operations.

This year, a further £75 million will be pumped into the programme, which leaves no doubt that this is a genuine move towards change.

Reuters plans that the moves will eventually create savings worth £485 million, with a much leaner organisation emerging at the end.

If everything goes to plan, the workforce will amount to about 16,000 people over four newly defined business segments: asset management, investment banking and brokerage, treasury and corporates, and media.

Mr Green is in charge of making the plan work and he relishes the idea of instituting change, as long as it is for a good reason.

"I take pleasure in a lot of it, because a lot of it is very positive. I believe Reuters is a great company and I believe it's a great time to be working for a great company," he says, displaying a characteristic belief in the integrity of whatever mission happens to be in hand.

In Reuters, he is focusing on the results of the transformation, rather than the (hopefully) short-term pain.

It was this long-term view that made joining Reuters about two-and-a-half years ago - a period when the organisation was fast losing its sheen - seem like an attractive idea for Mr Green. The job was always going to be hard; he had no experience in running an information business, particularly a global giant in difficulties. This was not viewed as a problem.

"What you need is what I call domain expertise," he says. "You need to understand the business but Reuters has got a lot of people who are very specialised in either editorial or technology or financial services."

He decided to leverage off the knowledge of his staff. It is interesting to note the first Reuters employees to be given notice under the BTP last summer were 50 senior managers. Mr Green was aware of the message that such a drastic move would send to investors and, in particular, to remaining Reuters staff - people Mr Green likes to refer to as the company's "closet of assets".

It was judged that morale among these employees would be higher if the jobs cull were to be equitable across all levels.

Mr Green's arrival has coincided with changes in the face of management in other "equitable" ways too, largely in mixing nationalities and sexes. Three out of the company's four business segments are now headed by women, for example.

Despite his best efforts, however, Mr Green has to admit that some members of the Reuters workforce have been badly affected by the enforced departure of colleagues, and service levels across Reuters may have suffered as a consequence.

"It is obvious that if an organisation is going through a lot of change, staff morale isn't going to be at the highest and, if staff morale isn't at the highest, no company will give the best customer service," says Mr Green.

"I believe we've passed the worst of that now because most of the job cuts are now done and I'm working very hard to improve morale. I'm very confident that, as morale improves, service levels will improve as well."

There is an added complication, however: just as Reuters began to feel the pain of its own restructuring last year, large sections of the group's natural client base in the financial services area started to have money problems.

Within the past month, Reuters's executives have said they expect to see further falls in subscriptions revenues this year, as bigger clients cut staff and need fewer Reuters "terminals" to provide information.

"What we didn't know at the time, when we started down this path, was obviously that the market itself was going through a very difficult period as well, so most of our customers have made major cutbacks and layoffs and redundancies and so on.

"So in a sense, there are two things going on at the same time. We've got our business transformation programme, which is ahead of schedule or on track, and at the same time the market is contracting. That's given us two challenges to cope with."

Against this backdrop, Mr Green says Reuters, despite being redefined along four areas, will remain as one organisation. No significant spin-offs are planned and a less-than-profitable majority shareholding in Nasdaq-listed electronic broker Instinet is, according to Mr Green, not under review. If anything, he expects Reuters to become more integrated than it was when he came on board.

For the customers, Irish banks and funds companies included, the changes in progress will be subtle but important, says Mr Green. Instant messaging capability is to be added to the Reuters flagship product by the end of the year and subscribers will soon be able to access products on an internet-based network.

Reuters is also developing more offerings in its growing tailored-solutions market.

Elsewhere, the group is building up for an assault on the North American financial information sector, a market where Bloomberg, the company established by New York City mayor, Mr Mike Bloomberg, is likely to put up a good fight. Asset-management companies are in the central target range for Reuters.

"If you think about Reuters, Reuters is particularly strong on the sell side as opposed to the buy side, and in Europe as opposed to America. Therefore, the geographic opportunity is in America and the other opportunity is the buy side, which is asset management," says Mr Green.

This US presence is given added support by Reuters's 2001 acquisition of part of Chapter 11 company, Bridge Information Systems, a small competitor in the financial information market.

All things considered however, Mr Green says that patience is required on the US growth front: "It's not a great time right now to be selling in Manhattan."

While the wait for economic recovery continues, Mr Green will continue to plug away at his transformation mission and is unlikely to consider any let-up in his seven-day-a-week work schedule.

He sees the key to this dedication as a simple sense of duty to the Reuters name.

"I think it's a great privilege because we've inherited what a lot of people have spent 150 years building," he says. "Our challenge is to put it in good shape for the next 150 years and that's a big responsibility."