Nothing seems to piss a New Yorker off more than losing a seemingly promising young citizen to La-la land, as if the move automatically signals the rapid loss of grey matter. Or worse, that it reveals something that was laying dormant all along – call it the ‘superficial gene’.
‘No-one works in LA,’ a Manhattan colleague told me in complete seriousness. ‘They just own three cars and drive all day.’ Never mind that this person spends seven hours every weekend on the Long Island Expressway to escape the city she so loves. I am not here to tell you why, from an investor relations standpoint, the west coast is ‘better’ – or to validate my experience here. For me the choice was simple: I wanted corporate experience and, at the time, opportunities in New York were limited. I’d lived in New York since 1986 and, frankly, I was ready for a change. I’d made it in a city that never sleeps and I was ready for a city that did.
Yet I suppose there were opportunities elsewhere; Los Angeles certainly doesn’t have the monopoly on corporate IR posts. What was the attraction? My choice wasn’t, after all, purely impulsive. I had some strong beliefs about the future. I’d narrowed my search down to two industries: telecommunications or entertainment, feeling strongly that no matter what the economy did, these two segments – pipes and content – promised unlimited growth.
Truth be told, however, once I made up my mind that LA was livable, I was ready to move before I even scored my dream job. My own innate, New York-honed aggressive instincts made me feel that in the midst of these ‘relaxed’ Angelenos, I would naturally find myself on top. The truth is, it takes a lot of work, and sometimes it takes a lot of driving.
The wonderful thing about LA is that everything here is a movie set. Nothing is what it seems. And beneath it all is the fabulously cut-throat desire to achieve the same goals as the hard-nosed realists in Gotham. What I have learned here hasn’t dampened my belief in my two chosen industries either. I took an IR post at a pipes company, but I have married it to what I have learned from the content providers around me. This is altogether fitting, as streaming video and web technology become the great levelers mandated by the SEC’s Regulation FD.
Star power
LA has more bona fide stars than anywhere else in the world. If you want to be a true star, you may start on Broadway, but eventually have to come to Hollywood. Stars have something called star power. This power often means that they not only have money, but they have influence – enough influence to choose the projects they want to work on, and to create an environment for themselves in which they are likely to succeed. Furthermore, everyone loves a star. Star power means being a natural magnet, someone people gossip about and imitate. People hang on stars’ words, studying them so that one day they might acquire some of the same power. They are the mobile kings and queens of America, these stars, and our society feeds on them.
The star-making industry – Hollywood itself – is not only the glue that holds the nation together, but the visual utopia of a unified world. Sure, world peace may look a bit like a B-grade movie, but most of us would be willing to be in a B-grade movie – and would rather be in one than in no movie at all.
The portrayal of the American ideal, the capitalist, democratic view of the world as projected by the entertainment industry onto the big screen, has helped raise a new generation of world children who are fully adept at living in California long before they ever move there. Alexander the Great’s one-world, Hellenistic view is alive and well, and living in what we call ‘the formula’.
That formula is key: if you find the formula, the story style that always works, the line that will always cause a tear, the look that communicates doleful humanity, the winning grin, then you possess the modern Holy Grail. Because just as we have brought the world’s most powerful stories into the world’s most powerful media, more people can see and hear and learn than ever before. And with the internet, there will be only more demand for more performances, more success and failure played out at our fingertips every day.
What does this all mean for IR professionals? Everything. If our CEOs aren’t interesting enough to cause the camera to take notice, the reporter to arch her eyebrow, the shareholders to believe, boards will have to tell their CEOs that they are ‘box office poison’ and conduct a search for a new star.
A company’s brand may be its star power. Take Disney, for example, a company with a star leader and a star-powered brand name. Walt Disney himself founded this formula, and the company failed to perform well at all after his death until Michael Eisner found the formula once again. (Some people would claim he lost it for a few years, but with Regis he has been able to provide Hollywood with another essential: a ‘comeback’.)
Shareholders are our audience. They are the mob, and the IR function must deliver the bread and circus. With the internet, we can reach a wider audience than ever before. All we have to do is script our story well, block out the scenes, place our cast before the audience, and hope to God they can deliver. Win or lose, we must give them a show. The same has come to be true of politics. President Clinton knew this well, as did Ronald Reagan, which is why once Washington discovered Hollywood, politics was never the same. With shareholders’ ability to view an annual meeting and re-cast their votes while they are listening to the CEO’s presentation, the IR professional who does not pay attention to the show-biz aspects of IR will ultimately have a public relations nightmare on his hands.
Or her hands. Our profession is historically female-rich. There are many divas in IR, stars in their own right. We are more likely the star-makers of the world, however. The woman behind the man or man behind the woman – or whatever. Never let anyone tell you that the true IR role is not strategic. This job has strategy at its very core. The story either works like a charm, the shareholders are happy, and the CEO rides off into the sunset, alive and well because of you – or, you work like a dog for no recognition and find yourself shoveling someone else’s manure. Either way, there’s no business like it.
Morgan Molthrop is VP of IR at Infonet Services Corporation in Los Angeles
