I’ve always claimed I do my best thinking when swimming: something about the metronomic pattern of repetitive movement in cold water allows you to focus and crowd out other thoughts.
I had plenty of time for clear thinking this week, swimming the English Channel from Dover to Calais as part of a four-person relay team. The rules around Channel relays are tightly controlled: no thermal assistance, just speedos, hat and goggles; two to six people per team, with each swimmer doing a strict, timed hour in the water in a fixed rotation. En route you’ll most likely encounter not only cold water and swimming through the night, but winds, swells, jellyfish, seasickness, cramp – not to mention traversing one of the world’s major shipping lanes – and a whole host of other challenges that might conspire to throw you off course.
The task is to ‘just keep swimming’ till you get to the other side.
In my third hour in the water late on Monday evening, admittedly perhaps influenced by a lack of sleep, it struck me how many parallels there are between endurance swimming and IR.
Building corporate credibility with a loyal, world-class investor base is, arguably, the ultimate rinse-repeat exercise: tell them what you’re going to do, do it, do it again, do it again for a third time – then they buy in size.
Quality IR is about low-fanfare execution, and this takes time to build. The pitfalls come from nowhere, suddenly: gale force winds, a foot-long jellyfish, a profit warning or a pandemic. If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that flexibility and calmness under pressure are key.
We have an extraordinary capacity to adapt and thrive – it’s how you deal with it and communicate that matters most.
Total reliance on the team around you is also key. When you’re freezing cold and exhausted in the early hours of the morning, getting back into cold water for another hour is the last thing you want to do – but the team has your back – and if you don’t get in then the whole team fails. In IR, we are similarly completely reliant on our colleagues and our management teams. This inter-dependence forms strong bonds of trust.
As I neared Calais, the French kicked in: ‘Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.’ Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr’s oft-repeated quotation from 1849 remains utterly modern. In IR, the pace of change and innovation over recent years have been mind-boggling. Yet the central mission remains completely unchanged: the clear, concise, transparent communication of a story – and in so telling, building trusting, confident relationships with the company’s key stakeholders.
Similarly, while no longer fuelled by cod-liver oil, brandy, ale and porpoise grease, the accounts of the first ever cross-Channel swim by Captain Webb in 1875, with jellyfish stings and strong currents off Cap Gris Nez, will be absolutely familiar to any 21st century Channel swimmer.
This year’s IR conference season brought a host of new ideas – and optimism – to the profession. Post a period of inflation, rate rises, political instability, war and shuttered IPO markets, conditions would appear to be easing.
AI, the buzzword of the moment, is moving from gimmick to essential business tool. It’s the iPhone in 2008 – an incredibly powerful platform, where we’re only just beginning to discern the real use cases. The productivity benefits could be enormous – and those who ignore it are likely to be the most disrupted. As always in IR, the pace of change is stimulating and daunting in equal measure. But this is inevitable in a profession at the leading edge of corporate thinking.
Our job as IR professionals is to keep abreast of the change, keep calm heads, sort the signal from the noise and report back to the executive team and the board what they need to know.
It’s going to be exciting!
Michael Hufton is founder and managing director of ingage IR
