Citing the obvious risks in trying to predict what will happen in a fragile global economy, FT management editor Andrew Hill notes that many companies are simply waiting, hoarding cash, holding off from embracing any particular scenario. But, he adds, mere expressions of caution don’t do much for their investors:

As executives’ reluctance to commit themselves grows, so the appetite of outsiders to know about their future plans increases. Investors are now far more interested in the “outlook” section of the company report than in the backward-looking summary of the historic results. But in their public statements, most chief executives hide behind a “lack of visibility”, adding to the general nervousness.

Hill says CEOs should “embrace uncertainty” in 2012 while at the same time communicating what they can see in the current situation:

Business leaders need to count on their ability to be the one-eyed man in the land of the blind – a proverb recently recast by Richard Rumelt in his book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy: “If you can peer into the fog of change and see 10 per cent more clearly than others see, then you may gain an edge.”

“We are the ultimate ADD society,” Sorkin said today in a speech to the Association for Corporate Growth Kansas City chapter. Patience is nowhere to be found, and that goes for the stock market and demands it places on managements, he said:

We keep saying we want more shareholder democracy because we want executives to think long-term. The problem is not that the people in power are short-termists, it’s that we are short-term thinkers.

As Exhibit A, Sorkin cited the statistic that the average shareholder holds onto a stock for only 2.8 months. Less than one quarter. Of course, high-frequency automated trading turns stocks over in milliseconds, and multiple times every day. But even individual investors can be fast-moving and fickle:

I would love to find a way to get our country back to being an investing society, not a trading society.

Sorkin acknowledged there’s no sign of that happening anytime soon. (Coverage of the rest of what Sorkin had to say is here or here.)

The investor relations person in search of a patient investor, in this environment, is something like a mythical but tragic hero. Solutions, anyone?

© 2011 Johnson Strategic Communications Inc.

“There’s basically a race to the bottom. They’re all dysfunctional in their own way,” Lauria says of the trio of companies that have been generating negative headlines. He reviews the CEO firings, shifting strategies and downward-moving stock graphs and then names “the worst board” – well, I won’t spoil it. You can watch the video.

No doubt H-P, Yahoo! and News Corp. might respond, “Who is Peter Lauria? What qualifies him to judge the merit of our boards of directors?” And they’d be right. He’s just a journalist who covers media, technology and telecom for Reuters.

On the other hand, he’s not alone in his assessment.

The positive side of this: If you’re doing investor relations for a company that does have a long-term, consistent strategy and high-quality board and management, you’ve got some very attractive selling points for long-term investors.

Focus your IR messages on the track record of your strategy and how it’s paying off, the quality and experience of management, and the expertise of your board. The long-term investors will be with you.

Jerome Booth, research director of London-based emerging markets specialist Ashmore Investment Management, makes an interesting point in a Sept. 14 Financial Times column. He posits that global markets are moving, slogging really, through the classic five stages of grief. When we lose a loved one, we follow a pattern described by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross as the five-step model of grief: denial … anger … bargaining … depression … and, finally, acceptance.

Booth applies this to global markets.

As investor relations people making our rounds with investors, we might probe what stage the patient is in, on any particular day, before launching into our story.

What has died, Booth writes, is our complacence in using debt to meet all needs:

Western Europe and the US now face years of painful deleveraging. The loss they feel is the death of the levered model enabling them to live beyond their means, plus a loss of prestige as their economic models have failed.

As an EM guy, Booth says we’ll have to adjust to kowtowing a bit to emerging markets. In the West right now, he writes, we’re in denial:

When faced with a truly awful prospect we explore and then cling to any theory or hope that reality may be different. Even where political leaders understand the immensity of their loss, the denial of their electorates constrains their action.

There are examples of anger – riots in Greece and other nations over economics. And of bargaining to delay unpleasant consequences or sweep them under the rug. Still ahead, perhaps, is the loss of hope a patient feels as depression. And we haven’t seen many signs yet that our leaders – or we the people – have moved on to acceptance of realities so we can deal with what needs to be done.

All this is very global and “macro,” but let’s think about how it applies to IR messages about the businesses we speak for:

• Above all, are we helping our management teams to avoid living in denial?
• In offering forward-looking views to investors, do we spell out assumptions on the economic factors that drive our particular businesses?
• Do we explain how we plan to perform if the economy stays weak for a long time, vs. signing onto consensus hopes for recovery in H2, or H1 2012, or  … ?
• When our stock is beaten-down, do we listen to see if the investor on the line is in the anger stage or depression – or maybe in a place to hear reality and look forward to ways out of the doldrums?
• Do we deal with debt and balance sheet metrics, including strategies for managing the balance sheet, in a way that helps investors understand?

Just a handful of thought-starters. I’m not arguing where investors’ sentiment should be – just saying IR people need to pay attention to where it is.

Mainly, I appreciate Booth’s wry insight into the psychology of today’s happy-nervous-elated-terrified-optimistic-not so sure-ever mercurial stock market. I’d love to hear your reactions.

© 2011 Johnson Strategic Communications Inc.

Key finding: 71% of the 431 investor relations professionals responding to NIRI’s survey hold a periodic analyst/investor day. It’s a chance to show off management and tell the company’s story in-depth. After all, you’re locking investors in a room for a half day or full day, so this is “quality time.”

Of course, the larger a company is, the more likely it is to host a regular analyst day. But even among small caps ($250 million-$2 billion), 63% offer a “day.”

Some 70% hold their analyst days in New York or another major investment center, while 40% invite investors in to meetings at a corporate facility, NIRI found.

A few thoughts based on analyst days I’ve been involved with:

• The CEO and CFO play host and give the strategic overview, but having a half day or more is a great opportunity to demonstrate management’s bench strength by bringing division heads, R&D leaders or operating executives forward for investors to meet them in a fairly controlled environment.
• It’s also a chance to put on display the chemistry of the management team – showing investors how the top execs relate to each other. Not a bad idea to do this some months after a big merger, to present a unified, compatible team.
• How often you hold an analyst day is up to you. How fast is the story evolving? If there’s progress every year, annual is great. If this year looks a lot like last, maybe not. (NIRI found 49% of companies who hold “days” do so annually, 35% less often, 12% on an ad hoc basis, 3% more than once a year.)
• The name “analyst day” doesn’t quite capture the fact that institutional investors are the primary audience. Sure, the sell side attends – but real shareholders and potential investors are the main point of the effort.
• I personally like the on-site analyst day, giving investors a feeling of seeing the business and kicking the tires, even though they’re carefully shepherded on any tours of the plant or laboratories. But a lot depends on your location. Call up a few analysts or investors and get their input before scheduling your day.
• Schedule enough breaks to let investors check email, used the phone and visit the restroom. It’s hard to limit your speakers – but, hey, give people a break.

What’s your experience with analyst days? Love ‘em? Hate ‘em? Any tips?

© 2011 Johnson Strategic Communications Inc.

Market volatility reached new extremes last week as we experienced global market moves of positive to negative 5% from one day to the next. Most believe it is very unlikely these market moves were driven by fundamental analysis of companies, but instead by panic, margin calls and computerized trading. For IROs, these are the most challenging market conditions as they lack logic and rational explanation. Time and other actions outside our influence and control will bring markets back into check, as we continue to tell our story to investors.

I agree, although market mayhem may be more rational than we can see at the moment. However much we dislike “panic,” if the market performs horribly going forward, fear will seem logical in retrospect. Time will tell whether investors should “Hang on and weather the storm” or “Batten down the hatches and go to cash.”

Certainly for IR professionals, whose individual companies may be doing fine even as the market goes crazy, it’s sound advice to hold the wheel … steady as she goes.

© 2011 Johnson Strategic Communications Inc.

Dimon doesn’t mince words about shortcomings in European finances, US policy making, even the state of banking. But he comes back to a bedrock optimism:

Confidence is like a secret sauce. … Here’s what I would say to the American public in total. When you go to sleep at night think about the following before you get depressed and you see the market down 500 points: This nation is still the greatest nation on the planet. It was the first democracy on the planet. We have the best military on the planet, and God bless our veterans all around the world, those who have served and those who are serving today. We have the best universities on the planet and the best businesses. Those things that I just said - best military, best rule of law, most innovation, the hardest working ethic of all – those things are going to be here for decades. They’re not going away. The strength in the system is going to blow your socks off when it gets out of this malaise we’re in. Those things are there.

It’s good to see an executive smiling. Regardless of what you think of Dimon or big banks, he’s expressing the spirit that drives American business. It’s worth watching both pieces on CNBC. Just to feel better on another day of, as they say, volatility.

By the way, in 2008 I shared 10 ideas on doing IR in a bear market. These apply today, too, for investor relations practitioners surveying the Wall Street carnage. I’d welcome your comments or ideas on helping our companies rise above the malaise.

© 2011 Johnson Strategic Communications Inc.

The President has pulled into the lead, ahead of a three-way tie among the Treasury secretary, “Other” (write-ins Ben Bernanke, Paul Volcker, Bill Clinton and “Someone who’s fluent in Chinese“) and “Oh, never mind!” What do you think?

Not a political comment … just a little comic relief amid wild days in the markets.

If you’re looking for an example of softening guidance by widening the range, Procter & Gamble provided just that today with its fiscal fourth-quarter results. For the new fiscal year, P&G forecast core EPS “in a range of $4.17 to $4.33, up six to 10 percent.” Fair enough. That’s not exactly fuzzy, but the range is a bit broader than P&G gave last year at this time (a 10-cent span in EPS, vs. 16 cents this year).

Market watchers commented on the change, as in The Wall Street Journal story headlined “P&G Outlook Reflects Jitters”:

P&G adopted a wider-than-normal range for its fiscal 2012 outlook, which encircled Wall Street estimates, calling for per-share earnings growth of 6% to 10%. The low-end is slightly below the consumer-product giant’s long-term goals for annual growth of high-single digits to low double-digit growth, largely on questions percolating through the global economy.

On P&G’s conference call, Chief Financial Officer Jon Moeller blamed a cloudy macro environment:

Our guidance ranges will be a little bit wider than normal this year, reflecting a broad policy uncertainty, ongoing high levels of volatility and market growth rates, input costs and foreign exchange, as well as uncertainty both upside and downside related to pricing across the portfolio.

So there you have it – big, sensible P&G is a pretty safe role model. Go ahead and add wiggle room to your guidance. We may all need it.

© 2011 Johnson Strategic Communications Inc.