“What you typically expect from a big company is the rank and file mentality, but I see a lot of diversity, and I mean that’s really part of the fun.”
Wubbo Tempel, Managing Director, Elsevier Health Sciences, Milan
Wubbo Tempel’s association with Elsevier goes back to 1984 when he left university and joined Elsevier’s newspaper NRC Handelsblad as a journalist. Now he runs Elsevier’s operation in Italy – what he calls “the local branch of the international Elsevier empire” – a journalist turned manager.
How did that career shift come about? “When I was a journalist I decided I’d better be a manager because I’m more organisationally inclined. The other thing is that a journalist’s role is frankly too negative for me, always looking for the bad things, although I still like to write very much.”
He has had ten jobs in different parts of the company, he explains. “But my break in to the management ranks was by becoming Managing Director of a conference firm in the then Dutch Reed Business part. Basically I got that job because on the one hand I knew how Elsevier management went and, on the other hand, with my experience as a journalist, I was used to being able to handle young, local professionals. That worked very well at the time.”
His development as a manager has taken him to a lot of different offices and places. He was head of Embase and then Excerpta Medica, and he also ran Elsevier France.
“I would say I have developed more of a specialism, and that is that I like to run outposts. I think that the real specialism I bring is a deep knowledge of Elsevier strategies and the fact that I am able to connect to the peculiarities of the outpost.”
Elsevier has given him “new and varied challenges every time,” he says. “Those are really opportunities to learn. I really think that it is mostly the career shifts that have supported my personal growth and development.”
He now manages 200 people in the Italian business and they rank highly in his reasons for wanting to stay with the company. “What you typically expect from a big company is the rank and file mentality, but I see a lot of diversity, and I mean that’s really part of the fun,” he says.
“Firstly, it is nice to work for the market leader, to work for a company with a strong strategy. Secondly, it’s the people. In my 24 years I have really developed a very nice network of highly diverse people within Elsevier. And for me, it is really the fact that I get new challenges every day.”
How long does he expect to stay with Elsevier? “As long as I can learn…When I was 30 and made a career switch, my then boss told me ‘you are an adventurer and you can do this now, but you cannot carry on like this until you are 50’. Basically now I am 50 and I have been able to do it. Elsevier gave me that opportunity.”