PEOPLE / TIM FERGUSON: GOT THE WHOLE WORLD IN HIS HANDS

Think globally. That’s the mantra of Tim Ferguson, who is overseeing the $285 billion managed by Putnam Investments’ equity and fixed-income groups.

“You can’t think of investments in just a U.S. sense anymore,” says Mr. Ferguson, who earlier this year was named head of investments, a new post at Boston-based Putnam. “If you focus just on the U.S., you’d miss opportunities or problems that may arise elsewhere.”

The intense 41-year-old Englishman, who speaks Japanese fluently, joined the nation’s fifth-largest mutual fund company in 1996 as a senior managing director and head of international equities. He had been chief executive of the asset management business of HSBC Holdings, the London-based parent of Hongkong & Shanghai Bank and Marine Midland Bank.

Louis Harvey, president of Dalbar Financial Services, a research firm in Boston, describes Mr. Ferguson’s new role as “enviable.”

“He’s sitting on top of a well-built engine right now,” Mr. Harvey says. “I don’t see him facing any huge problems.”

Mr. Ferguson’s rapid ascent has been helped by continuing efforts to streamline senior management.

In his 13 months as head, the international equity team expanded to 16 portfolio managers from seven and doubled its number of analysts and other investment pros to 60. During that period, international assets managed climbed to $17.4 billion from $9.6 billion.

Last year, Mr. Ferguson rose to chief of global equity investments and took over the company’s newly merged domestic and international equity groups. In January, Putnam added the bond group to his platter.

Today, he is responsible for keeping tabs on 480 employees and $285 billion in assets.

“We now have just one investment division,” he says from his two-room office overlooking historic Post Office Square. “The next challenge is to bring together certain common underpinnings that serve the division as a whole.”

Already Putnam has broken down the walls between stocks and bonds in such areas as trading and administration. Other functions that may be shared by the two groups include research and risk management, he says.

Mr. Ferguson doesn’t seem to believe in taking things slowly. Two months after taking control of the fixed-income group, he started reshaping it. As a result, the group now comprises two units: one for core debt, the other for tax-exempt bonds. A third unit, investing in junk bonds, was made part of the core group.

The changes, which included the dismissal of eight bond portfolio managers, are intended to allow Putnam to focus more on multisector funds, a growing breed of bond funds that mix junk with corporate and international issues.

Industry watchers applauded the changes, saying Putnam had been wasting its time trying to compete with lower-cost firms like Vanguard Group on mainstream bond funds.

“They’ve sort of moved to a pretty different fixed-income management style,” says Christopher Brown, an analyst at Financial Research Corp., a Boston firm that tracks fund sales.

Mr. Ferguson is optimistic. “I’m very, very pleased with the progress the team has made in the first four months,” he says.