How to Balance Long-Term Vision with Market Demands | Profiling UK Public Leaders

Profiling UK Public Leaders, Episode 10

Gordon Stein qualified as an accountant in the eighties and has since sat on the boards of seven public companies, five of them on the London Stock Exchange, mostly in energy and exploration. Asked what has changed most in 25 years, his answer is immediate: the way people can now talk about your company, and the fact that you cannot talk back.

The one-way conversation

Investors discuss companies constantly on social media and messaging groups, and Stein sees the upside. What frustrates him is the asymmetry. When individuals with agendas or misunderstandings spread misleading information, a director cannot wade in and challenge it, because regulatory obligations do not follow you onto a forum. The correction has to come another way.

The way that has worked for him is structured verbal communication. The companies he is involved with now run Q&A sessions shortly after announcements, with a facilitator putting the difficult questions to the CEO or chairman. His reasoning: a written announcement will be read ten different ways by ten different people, and verbal explanation is a hundred times better at carrying context. The session gives shareholders somewhere to hear the actual answer before the speculation fills the gap.

Breaking ten years into catalysts

Stein's world is early-stage companies, where the journey from concept to production can run a decade, and much of the timeline, like permitting and government approvals, is outside the company's control. Some investors, in his experience, do not really grasp that. They are working to a two or three year horizon and want results next week.

You cannot change the timeline, but you can control the messaging. His approach is to break the long journey into bite-size pieces: identifiable catalysts and value points the market can anticipate, hit, and then look forward from to the next one. Shareholders who cannot play the long game can play the short game, catalyst by catalyst.

The same logic applies to bad news, which a public company is almost always obliged to release anyway. Investors respect honesty, and an unexplained delay left to the forums will be read as the worst case. Get it out, explain it verbally, and let people hear the reason rather than invent one.

What a board is actually for

Gordon’s considers the most underrated board skills as challenging constructively, including taking on your chairman, and listening. The best director he currently sits with says little, then produces the question nobody had thought of.

His other point is about board composition on the London market. Too many directors are there for the brand of their former employer rather than for anything they bring. Someone whose whole career was in organisations where money was never a problem, he argues, is poorly equipped for a small company that has to manoeuvre without capital in a bad market. Every director should be adding something, technical, financial, or operational, beyond the monthly board meeting, or they should not be there.

On what comes next, he is candid: he thinks that leaders like him must either learn AI or surround themselves with people who have. Pretending it is not coming, as he puts it, is not a way to move a company forward.