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offended me the most was the notion that Jack Grubman was more interested in making a splash than in really understanding what he was writing about. I couldn’t believe that he was willing to sign his name to research so shoddy. I would have been mortified if someone corrected me like that, mortified that people would think that my analysis and research were shallow and misleading. But maybe this was my own insecurity coming to the fore. I had always been the one who outresearched or outstudied everyone else rather than wowing people with quick answers or brainpower. I’d never been the genius—not in high school, college, or at work. Rather, out of necessity I suppose, I simply tried to work harder and dig deeper than anyone else.
    So I couldn’t really help myself as I listened to Jack’s grating voice and heard that feigned apology. “This is embarrassing for me,” I said, turning red. “I’m a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and I’m embarrassed to be part of a profession that has people like you doing research that is so misleading and irresponsible.” Jack responded with a series of condescending mumbles to the effect that I didn’t have a clue about how Wall Street worked, that he was simply doing what he was paid to do and, given the huge amount PaineWebber was paying him, he must be damn good at it. We hung up. He didn’t change his report, though, fortunately, it had less impact than we’d feared. I had had my first clash with Jack Grubman.
    Street Smarts
    Despite my troubling experience with Jack, I came to really enjoy the investor relations job and my interactions with the wild, fast-paced world of Wall Street. I quickly learned that investor relations was more of an art than a science—especially when it came to managing the analysts’ earnings expectations. Knowing how companies did this was a skill that would serve me very well later, when I moved to the Street.
    Bert Roberts, MCI’s president, believed that it was critical that MCI’sshares trade higher on the day of quarterly-earnings releases. This was because the next day’s press coverage would be enthusiastic if we met or beat expectations, and full of fawning quotes from the analysts that followed us. But if we missed the Street’s earnings expectations and our stock price fell that day, the articles would be negative and critical. This, Bert believed with good reason, would influence customers’ perceptions of MCI as a stable supplier of telecom services. The more positive the press coverage, the easier it would be for a corporate telecom manager to buy more services from upstart MCI rather than old, reliable AT&T. So that meant that those of us in investor relations had to try to make sure that the stock reacted positively on earnings day.
    In practice, that meant two things. If it had been a bad quarter, we needed to leak that information slowly and quietly, so that the stock would drop during the week or two before the earnings announcement, but without generating any media attention. That was a lot better than the stock plummeting on earnings day, when the world was focused on it. Positive news would also be leaked but downplayed a bit, so that the stock would still see a decent bounce when the better-than-expected news hit. It was a common practice, so common that I didn’t even take note of it at the time. (The SEC’s Regulation FD, for Fair Disclosure—which required that all financial information be released to everyone at the same time—wasn’t passed until 13 years later.) Yet it meant that some people benefited, while others, primarily small investors, never knew what was going on. It was simply, I learned, part of the game.
    Sometimes getting that news out meant making just a few calls to the analyst community. If we felt the Street’s earnings projections and thus MCI’s stock price were too low relative to what we were likely to deliver, we often would call two or three top sell-side Wall Street analysts. The