The Earnings Call
XYZ Widgets International Corporation was in dire financial straits. AI was upsetting everything, including, not surprisingly, the highly tactile widget industry. People were so busy sending tweets that they had hardly any time to do their widgeting, that all-American tradition. Consequently, it was going downhill, threatening to join ranks with the completely forgotten buggy whip.
The CEO of XYZWIC (pronounced zi-wick) was particularly tense. The earnings call was just about to go down, and there was nothing but bad news and even more bad news. With the CEO were the senior executives, all gathered around the conference table. One person who stood out was not wearing the senior executive uniform of a $1,500 suit. He had short brown hair that was neatly parted, wore tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses, and had on a tweed-style tan sports jacket with elbow patches. He was a very famous college professor specializing in philosophy, and he would handle the entire call, an extremely unusual tactic for an earnings call. But desperate times called for desperate measures.
Soon the phone’s speaker crackled to life, signaling the beginning of the call. After the safe-harbor statement, full of disclaimers that all forward-looking statements are informed opinion not fact, the call began.
“Good afternoon,” said the CEO. “Today we are trying something new. The esteemed professor, Mr. Sebastian Sophisman, will handle the entire call. I think you will find it highly informative.”
Murmurs from the participants could be heard.
“Thank you, Frank,” said Mr. Sophisman. “First, I’d like to say that demanding that a corporation define itself by its quarterly earnings is forcing it into inauthentic servitude to external expectations. We at XYZ Widgets exercise absolute freedom by choosing not to be defined by numbers. The stock plunging 87% during early market trading should not merely be tolerated; it must be embraced with heroic ecstasy.”
More murmurs could be heard from the participants. The CEO became even more nervous.
Mr. Sophisman continued. “As you all know, as sophisticated members of the financial community, you never step into the same river twice. Expecting year-over-year revenue stability denies the cosmic law of endless becoming.
“And think of the consumer! That is what XYZWIC is all about! The collapse in consumer demand shows us they prefer tranquility by desiring less. By producing virtually zero desirable widgets, we have liberated our customer base from consumerist anxiety, leading them to true peace!”
On and on did the famed philosopher weave his spell, a true inspirational tour de force. Leaning forward aggressively over the boardroom table, bracing his weight with his left hand flat against the wood surface, he cycled through dozens of Western civilization’s greatest minds in the service of rehabilitating the struggling company. There was Parmenides and the illusion of reality (“Earnings aren’t real”); Plato’s abstract, non-material forms (“Unbuilt widgets already exist as true universal forms”); Marcus Aurelius and Stoicism (“Stock losses? Suck it up!”); Machiavelli’s pragmatic survival (“A great shorting opportunity!”); and many, many more. This went on for a full thirty minutes, a rhetorical marathon that even had the senior executives around the conference table enthralled.
And then it was over; the ensuing silence was total. Then, all of a sudden, a massive burst of applause sounded from the speaker, so loud that there was more distortion than clapping. The CEO looked at the XYZ stock chart on his computer monitor. It had shot up 20% since the professor did his thing. Delighted, he terminated the phone call and, in a rare moment of exuberance, offered drinks to all as a cap to a wonderful day.
You see, the CEO was quite the cynic. He got the idea of hiring Mr. Sophisman upon reading about an art commission by the Kunsten Museum. The museum gave Danish conceptual artist Jens Haaning roughly $84,000 in cash to recreate two past works framing bank notes. Instead, Haaning delivered two completely blank canvases titled Take the Money and Run, kept the cash, and declared the theft itself to be the work of art.
In the art world, where ideas are the true currency, not craftsmanship, anyone calling out the artist’s dishonesty would be shunned as an uninformed troglodyte. The CEO figured he could do the same thing in his world of finance. Those who objected to Mr. Sophisman’s intellectual high-mindedness would in turn be labeled unsophisticated, an ignorant rube. After all, most stocks are about “guidance,” what the future will produce. In such a world, where real money is tendered based on future promises, why not use conceptual jargon to transform that vacuum into a tangible win?
