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If you wanted to really help eight billion people
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grapple with the world of AI,
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then you needed to help the 150 million educators
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and instructors out there to help the eight billion.
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How do you keep a 180-year-old company relevant?
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This is something that Pearson has done time and again
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and is doing it again today.
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I'm Ernesto Pagano and this is Bold Moves in TMT.
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(upbeat music)
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Our guest is Omar Abbosh, CEO of Pearson.
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From its beginning as a construction company
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to a famous publisher to a major force in education,
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Pearson has reinvented itself multiple times.
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Omar, thank you so much for being with us today.
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It's my pleasure.
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When you started,
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you found Pearson being a holding company
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of several businesses and many, many P&Ls.
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And you're trying to shift from a holding concept
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towards an operating concept.
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How are you doing that?
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So Pearson was built up with a lot of M&A.
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So if you go back to the days of Marjorie Scordino,
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the company was truly conglomerate,
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like a proper conglomerate.
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We owned Madame Tussauds, we owned Chateau Latour,
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we owned a stake in Lazard's bank,
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and, of course, The Economist
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and Penguin Random House and the FT.
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And so the people who were at the top of the company
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actually were promoted through the ranks of finance and M&A.
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Those are not operators.
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They're amazingly smart finance people,
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sometimes strategists, but not typically operators.
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So to make the shift to the operating company,
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we had to think about firstly leadership.
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How do I have a set of leaders
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who have either deep customer instincts
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or deep product instincts?
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If you don't have that in the front,
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then you're not operating.
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Probably the biggest difference for our people
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is, in the past,
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when you lived in 1 of the 25 little silos,
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you literally couldn't see what was happening elsewhere.
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Harmonizing to a single career architecture,
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helping people say, "Well, actually these are the levels.
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These are the expectations of the roles.
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This is a go-to-market career path.
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This is a product career path.
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This is a learning and content development career path,"
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that allows you to create movement of careers
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and allows us to create career pathways for our people.
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And that should be
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one of the biggest differences for our folks.
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Sounds like a lot of hard work to do that.
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Something that they should have done maybe earlier.
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Companies are always in flux,
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always moving and always changing.
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And I think Pearson has been doing a lot of that,
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as you said, beforehand.
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Over 182 years, it pivoted many, many times.
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And this is just the latest sequence.
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I think we've had, you know, a change arc
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to become more of an education
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and learning company for the world.
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And now we want to be the leading
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lifelong learning company in the world.
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And that's the shift that we're making now.
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You see the role of the CEO
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also has the role as the chief learning officer.
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So tell us more about, what do you mean with that?
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Okay, so this is a bit of a story.
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So if I can unpack it a little bit.
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AI, I believe,
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will fundamentally change every single industry,
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most processes, most jobs,
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over the next ten years in a very profound way.
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I don't believe in the doom story of the AI job apocalypse.
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I think that's a load of nonsense.
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It actually looks like re-engineering in the 1990s
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where you go in a very profound and deep way to say,
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actually, these tools, these new tools
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are unbelievably powerful.
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How do I put them to use?
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And the long pole in the tent,
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as you know, is always the people.
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It's never the technology.
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And so you have to bring the people with you.
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And that is literally a CEO-level job.
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And so the CEO has to think hard about, "Actually,
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how do I help people learn?
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How do I help them thrive in this era?
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How do I equip them to be successful in this era?
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How do I overcome the fears?
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How do I overcome the resistance?
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How do I drive motivation in this era
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where they can elevate with a load of AI agents
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and actually perform better, faster, cheaper than before?"
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And that's the journey in front of us.
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I think all companies are going to have to go through that
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and that's why the CEO is the chief learning officer.
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Omar, thank you so much
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for being part of Bold Moves in TMT.
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Thank you so much.
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(bright music)