“Keeping Your Foot Away From Your Mouth” This headline in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal piece (p.D1) highlights a common human frailty. Citing gaffes from business leaders, politicians and entertainers, the WSJ says words do matter – and verbal errors can cause lasting damage. In investor relations, of course, foot-in-mouth syndrome is one of our worst [...]
As investor relations professionals, we’ve all seen PowerPoint slides that get just a little bit out of control. Too many bullets, too many words, too many pictures – the CEO makes one more addition – and a visual aid turns into a visual Frankenstein. For your weekend enjoyment, I thought I’d share this slide – [...]
January 1, 2010 – 10:24 pm
Just about everyone is happy to see 2009 fading into history and brighter prospects dawning with the new year. I share the enthusiasm for a new start, not to mention more favorable year-over-year comparisons. And I wish you personally a healthy and prosperous 2010.
The first question we confront, as communicators who will often cite the [...]
November 13, 2009 – 1:33 pm
The CFO of a local company made a good point today during a panel discussion on the state of the capital markets: It’s the substance of a company’s story that matters to investors, more than style or charisma – especially in tough times.
Ryan VanWinkle, senior VP and CFO of NYSE-listed Ferrellgas Partners LP, was asked [...]
November 4, 2009 – 5:44 pm
You gotta love Global Positioning Systems – finding almost anything, guiding you through the streets, offering data to get you to your destination. And you don’t have to fold them back up, like the roadmaps people used in the old days.
I thought about roadmaps – and their GPS counterparts – as I was working on [...]
October 27, 2009 – 5:52 pm
Companies often find themselves explaining strategies to investors, and investor relations people should be experts on how our corporations are creating value, building competitive advantage and so on. But strategy isn’t the whole story.
Some words of wisdom on strategy – and execution – come from Paul Polman, chief executive officer of Unilever, in the McKinsey [...]
October 23, 2009 – 8:45 pm
If you enjoy seeing your data in graphic form – not just drab tables or bland bullet points – you’ve got to check out a website called FlowingData. Nathan Yau, a PhD candidate in statistics at UCLA, publishes the site – a wealth of interesting pictures.
Investor relations people and our audiences are, of course, data [...]
A Stanford University business professor, Jeffrey Pfeffer, takes on “shareholder capitalism” in an article in the July-August issue of Harvard Business Review.
Pfeffer argues in “Shareholders First? No So Fast …” that the pendulum is swinging from stockholders toward stakeholders. Noting the recent political changes and populist backlash after the carnage in financial and credit markets, he [...]
