Ubiquitous transparency: Bloomberg culture

HONG KONG—In the office of Bloomberg News, glasses can be seen everywhere. Transparency is a unique main core in Bloomberg culture.

Fresh fruits, abundant snacks, exquisite desserts, splendid harbor views, and the savory smell of coffee greeted people when entering the 25th floor of Cheung Kong Center. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, lots of people were sitting at the French window with coffee and snacks. It was hard to believe that this is actually a news office, the office of Bloomberg Hong Kong, the headquarters of Asia.

Fion Li, the Hong Kong Bureau Chief of Bloomberg News, greeted journalism students from Baptist University warmly. She gave a short tour around the whole Bloomberg. According to her basic introduction, Bloomberg was first founded in 1981 by Michael R. Bloomberg in the United States. Up to now, Bloomberg News has more than 130 bureaus all over the world, with about 19000 employees in total. They have around 2500 journalists and 5000 technologists and software engineers. Due to its advanced data terminal system, Bloomberg has the largest financial data supplement in the world. The terminal system can help customers to monitor and analyze the global market and financial data in real time. Every employee, including the journalists in Bloomberg has their own terminal.

“When Michael was establishing Bloomberg, he considered about having a transparent bond trading,” Fion said, “so we have the strongest terminal system tracking all the real-time financial trends.”

Fion showed how the terminal system works on her own one. The large database not only included financial market information, but also covered all the property information and relationship maps of every popular celebrity in global commercial field, such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

“It’s all about transparency. You can see that all the walls in Bloomberg are made of glass.” Fion said.

Walking around Bloomberg, transparent fish tanks are the main decorations. Even the conference rooms and separated small meeting rooms are in glasses. Every actions and working status are visible for everyone, this is how Bloomberg shows their main idea. More than this, their transparency culture is not only displayed in their interior, it can be found in their organizational structure as well.

Entering the news room, recording and broadcasting studios on the 26th floor, it can be seen that every worker had a desk with many computers busying with data analysis on it. No one had a separate room. As Fion introduced, they have a horizontal hierarchy.

“Even I’m the bureau chief, I also work together with all the employees in this large space,” she said, “In some tradition business culture in China, usually only those senior managers can have their own private space and good views…the more senior you are, the better views you can have. But in Bloomberg, we don’t have this rule, we share the space and harbor views together, that’s what we are proud of.”