Diller: Beating (Wall Street's) expectation of earnings is yesterday's game

Reuters Media Summit

Barry Diller: “It’s not that you don’t want to earn as much money as you can — it is your obligation, of course — but companies have obligations beyond that and they certainly have obligations beyond that at certain times, in the times in which they operate. And they also certainly ought to know that meeting and beating expectations is probably yesterday’s game and it will be increasingly so, which would be by the way very healthy for companies. Running a company that meets and beats expectations, and that runs their company accordingly, are companies that I would question why anyone would invest in.”

Here's a quick clips of Diller saying the above.



This second clip has Diller parsing the utility of saving 20, 30 or 40 million dollars (about what many job cuts aim for at mid-cap sized orgs) in a year "when nobody's counting."



I don't know what Diller's positions have been in the past when QVC or other outfits he's run have encountered the fainting spells of Wall Street analysts agog over his quarterly numbers. My guess is he's less than pure on this front if he's a pure-bred American CEO. Regardless, there's a whole bunch of epiphanies happening out there.

No doubt, much of what's coming to pass is thanks to the damaging effect of a singular idea of the last 30 years, when the spadework of doing, as our parents did, became unsexy and unfulfilling: Profit became "the product"--The Moonshot--of many companies and the near-myopic focus of many leaders and our network of value-measuring and dictating institutions. Any sense of the power of work--and profit as meaningful proof of any work's worth--long since went out the window as a passe mark of the goofy or unsophisticated person. Well, reality is back in vogue and, let's hope, not too late.

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This reminds me of something from Shalom Schwartz and Amir Licht that's useful as an executive measure when pondering corporate governance and direction. I'll dig it up and post something on it later.