The Wall Street Journal ran a piece a few weeks ago highlighting the computer illiteracy of certain CEOs and other corporate chieftains, even some who run huge technology-based companies. Among the anecdotal evidence offered was one cover-boy chairman who for more than a year has had a PC in his office but has yet to turn it on.
Can IR officers and agency executives also avoid the necessity of hands-on technical competency? Can they still say, ‘That’s someone else’s job’?
A decidedly unscientific survey suggests the answer is a definitive no. Indeed, some see techno-skill – both in using the tools of information technology and an ability to envision and react to the big picture concepts of what technology is doing to competition and markets – as a key ingredient for career success. And that applies both to those on the tail end of an IR career path and for those still on the upswing.
Consider Larry Bishop, senior investor relations officer for Seattle-based Boeing and widely respected in the profession. At 60, Bishop has lived through some momentous changes in how financial information is gathered, processed and communicated. He says he ‘has a foot in each generation,’ between those who find computers and electronic information alien and perhaps frightening, and those whose working life has never been without them.
‘I remember when the computer was just a glorified typewriter,’ he says. ‘Now my office looks like the inside of a 747.’
Bishop personally uses First Call, Reuters and Dow Jones electronic financial information services, while others in his department of three use Bloomberg and the Internet. Boeing also maintains an Intranet (a protected net-within-a-net) which many of its 120,000 employees can access. Some 8,000 of those employees work in the Information Services Group.
‘Probably because of the craft I practise, I’ve become sensitive to the need to learn what the technology means,’ Bishop says. ‘I wasn’t dragged into this kicking and screaming.’
And Bishop says he remains watchful to where IT trends point. At this year’s Niri conference in Naples, Florida, for example, he was impressed by a presentation on IR-oriented World Wide Web home pages, which in turn made him realise that Boeing was perhaps behind its aerospace competitors on the Internet communications front. Bishop then organised a taskforce, drawn from Boeing’s public relations department, the corporate secretary’s office, his own group and elsewhere in the company, to devise ways of revamping and upgrading the quality and scope of information conveyed across Boeing’s Web front page.
Does Bishop consider computer and electronic information critical in the applicants he interviews for positions?
‘It is paramount. A non-negotiable requirement,’ he says. ‘For an old guy like me, I couldn’t afford not to have that resident in the staff.’
Nor, it seems, in an agency environment.
Chip Swearngan, at 35 a vice president at the corporate and financial division of Edelman Public Relations in New York, belongs to that age group which readily accepts technological change. He banks online and last April paid his taxes electronically. His major account is Sweden’s telecommunications and cellular giant Ericsson.
Edelman’s New York office generated some $18.2 mn in fees from high technology clients last year, beaten only by Burson Marsteller’s $19.6 mn New York showing. Edelman was also the first agency to put up a home page.
Swearngan, for his part, can track his career by advances in communications technology. When he was fresh out of the University of North Carolina, office technology meant the early, stinky fax machines, called Quips.
Faxes gave way, somewhere around 1989, to using modems to send earnings releases to Business Wire. By 1994, clients were sending raw data to him through e-mail.
Then last year, Swearngan helped a client prepare a release while on a trade show exhibit floor, with a cellular transmission to the nearby Business Wire office and from there on to the press relations service’s World Wide Web home page, all within 30 minutes.
‘I’ve been something of a thorn in the side everywhere I’ve worked about maximising the use of technology as a communications tool,’ Swearngan says. ‘No part of public relations has been more impacted than investor relations. A lot of what we do is being driven by it.’
Therein lies opportunity, Swearngan says, to extend the level of service delivered to clients without much fuss. By way of example, he says he regularly monitors online chatting across the Internet’s vast News Group arena and on other electronic forums, where the free-for-all, grassroots commentary can be more of a true barometer of retail investors’ sentiment than any number of analyst conference calls or annual meeting questions.
Swearngan says that he recently downloaded some 25 pages worth of materials from America Online’s Motley Fool financial information service, which he synthesised and passed on to the client under discussion. ‘It’s a way of saying, Don’t take my word for it, here’s what they are saying about you,’ he says.
If you’re in the IR game for the long haul and recognise some deficiencies in your own techno-smarts, what can you do at this stage of the game?
One leading executive headhunter counsels taking the initiative to get training, even if that means using some vacation time and paying for courses and travel without reimbursement.
‘CEOs want IR executives who do more than just understand the present. They’re looking for those who are working on the cutting edge,’ says Carolyn Smith Paschal, whose Paschal International firm in Del Mar, California is among the more successful senior IR placement agencies in the US.
In her 17 years as a senior IRO recruiter, Paschal has become a fixture in the profession. Among her clients are scores of Silicon Valley and Seattle area technology companies, whose appetite for technology-savvy IR executives has no limit, she says. ‘For good job seekers, it’s a buyer’s market. There’s far more demand than there are people.’
‘CEOs are looking for candidates who are energetic, who understand the Street and how technology is impacting their companies and competitors,’ Paschal says. ‘What I hear time and time again is a need for flexibility and adaptability, and a willingness to accept change. It’s really about big thinking and leadership.’
Paschal says that the non-technically literate CEOs are often the ones most adamant about hiring a skill set heavy on technology experience. ‘They recognise that they need people around them who have the knowledge already, and they use consultants like me because we know how to identify those people,’ she says.
Over the years Paschal has seen investor relations salaries jump, more IROs reporting directly to CEOs and CFOs, and a new-found emphasis on communicating visions for a company’s future.
Now, with a push to develop more corporate IR executives with a strong appreciation for the role of technology in business, she expects to see some dramatic changes in the kind of IRO most likely to rise to the top of the profession.
‘In today’s IR, you can’t judge competency or experience by age. There are brilliant young people leapfrogging their way to the top,’ she says. ‘Things are moving very fast.’
