Environmentalists coined the mantra ‘think globally, act locally’. Now one person could well be an environmentalist, an investor relations officer and a corporate secretary at the same time. But even if you’re not a tree-hugger or a whale lover, the slogan is still an apt one.
In this the corporate secretary and the IRO are the same. They are each responsible for a unique job within a corporation, isolated and sometimes alienated from their fellow workers. It becomes essential to their survival, not to mention their sanity, to maintain a perspective on much more than just their own office, department, and company. They reach out to their counterparts at other companies, often in other industries, to compare notes, to ‘benchmark’.
The roles of corporate secretary and investor relations are very different in other ways. Most obviously, just a decade ago the IRO was still a very rare species, while the corporate secretary traces his roots back to the genesis of the modern public company. In the last several years investor relations has exploded, popping up at every company from the bluest blue-chip to the greenest IPO. And the National Investor Relations Institute and the American Society of Corporate Secretaries have both grown to over 4,000 members.
These two entities are among the strongest and most dynamic professional organizations anywhere for precisely the reason that corporate secretaries and IROs ‘think globally, act locally’. Both organizations put a high emphasis on education and on benchmarking, extending the world view of their members beyond their companies and their industries. As members of both congregate in June for their annual conferences, they get to compare notes on everything from board structure to shareholder base, technology to support staff. They may later visit each others’ offices, or perhaps set up informal gatherings of their counterparts in the same sector. As remarked by Mary Thurber, director of IR at Cisco Systems, ‘We don’t see each other as competitors; we see each other as valuable resources.’
Corporate secretaries and IROs share much more than the need to benchmark. They share an environment for companies that is changing rapidly. Corporate governance has been through a revolution and is now settling down to a new ethos: an active, informed and independent board of directors that’s accountable to shareholders. Meanwhile, many companies are confronting a change in their shareholder base as retail investors – many trading online – take investment decision-making in their own hands. Luckily, these investors are driven by the same technology that lets companies scale up their shareholder relations to meet their demands for full, open and direct disclosure.
Look around you. Look far and wide. Public companies are facing global warming, and corporate secretaries and IROs are sitting on the same hot seat.
