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The Dreaded Conversation

This morning, I had the conversation with my youngest son that I’ve been hoping I would not have for several more years. Below is an actual transcript of the conversation as it is now forever burned into my memory.

William:  “Ummmm, Dad. I need to ask you something.”

Me:  “Oh yeah? What’s up?”

William:  “Well, we were talking about some stuff at school and I just didn’t know what to say.”

Me: “What do you mean? Who were you talking to?”

William: “My friends… at lunch…”

Me: “Yeah, and what were you talking about?” (now covered in a fine sheen of shvitz)

William: “Well… we were talking about grown up stuff… and…”

Me: (dying slowly while pretending to still be sorta watching Mike & Mike on ESPN2)

William: “... and… well… let me ask you something first…”

Me: “Okay.”

William: “Dad, do you have a job?”

Me: “Yeah, baby, I have a job. That’s what I do when I go to work.”

William: “Okay. Right. Okay. So… ummm… what’s your job?”

Me: “Oh… my job? Well… let’s see… I… uhhh…” (now in full panic - how do you explain IR to a 6-year old?!!?)

I think I mumbled something about helping companies tell their stories to people and help them answer questions when people have questions for them. I may have even mentioned something about intangible assets. Whatever I said, it felt lame but he let me off the hook as he came right back with “Yeah, I thought so. I could do that too when I’m a grown up. Hey Dad, can I still be a fireman and do what you do too?”

Me: “Of course, baby. You can be anything you want - and I know you’ll be great at doing it!”

So I gotta know - how have you explained what investor relations to your kids?

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The Bottom Line

Did you read the fine print of Dominic Jones’ recent blog post? Hysterical. I literally LOL‘ed when I read that. Never knew Dominic needed a quasi-Oliver North/Fawn Hall to justify a posting.

All kidding aside - I do agree with Dominic’s thoughts on this piece by McCarthy Tétrault. The harder we push to police social media content, the harder it is going to be to ignore similar “belts and suspenders” for private, one-on-one discussions with investors.

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IR & CSR - worlds colliding or nature taking its course?

Given all the chatter on Twitter about the SEC requiring every company “to disclose the impact that business or legal developments related to climate change…”, I thought I’d ask you what you thought about all this.

I have long thought IROs that avoid influencing their company’s disclosures on corporate social responsibilities (or CSR for those Alphabet Soup fans) are missing an opportunity to shed light on an important intangible asset at the very least and shirking a fiduciary duty at worse.

So - tell me - is the intertwining of CSR and investor relations an example of worlds colliding or simply nature taking its course?

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Sometimes you can believe what you read

Just wanted to be sure you folks saw this good interview with Ken Altman of The Altman Group. I grew up professionally with Ken at Hill & Knowlton in the late 80s and can honestly say he’s an even better person than he is a practitioner (and he’s a heck of a practitioner). 

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