The publication of this 50th issue of Investor Relations is a timely moment to take stock of the changing nature of the IR discipline since our launch. Perhaps the most striking change is this: that when we published our first issue back in September 1988, most people in the industrialised western world outside the US – even those involved in business or finance – had not even heard the term investor relations. Just four countries had IR societies back then. Today there are 15 national groups affiliated to the International Investor Relations Federation; and there are people in IR roles in many more countries than the IIRF represents.
But what of the issues? Our launch edition led with a story entitled What to do when the Chairman Dies? Bad taste, some said. But it was addressing the question of succession and the problem that can arise when a company is seen as being too dependent on a single individual, whose departure – for whatever reason – might leave a vacuum. That’s still an issue; one of the stories in this edition looks at the reinvention of Lonrho since the end of the autocratic, one-man-band style leadership of Tiny Rowland and the taking up of the reins by the more institution-friendly Dieter Bock.Another of the stories in that first magazine, Defensive Measures, was a case study of a successful rebuff of a takeover attempt – still (or perhaps again) a hot topic, reflected in the recent battle for control of RJR Nabisco, covered in this issue.
But there’s no use pretending things haven’t changed fundamentally. Major preoccupations today – like shareholder litigation, the role of technology, particularly the Net, and corporate governance – hardly troubled the average IRO in the 1980s.
More broadly, IR has become both markedly more sophisticated and decidedly more demanding. Back then, most IROs could survive being computer-illiterate with a domestic focus and a nine-to-five attitude. Today, that approach is simply not compatible with a job that is all about meeting the needs of an investment community that cares less and less about national boundaries, more and more about a company’s capacity to measure up to global competition. And if all the world’s now the stage, then 24 hours is now the clock, cyberspace the medium.
Being in the information business in the information age presents tremendous opportunities, which is why working in IR offers more prospects today than anyone thought it would a decade ago. That’s also why it demands more blood, sweat and tears: the technophobic, the xenophobic and the workshy should leave now.
