You Cannot Edit Your Way Out of Bad Analysis

By this point in the bedrock series you have walked through the architecture laid out in The Bedrock of Investor Communication, the assertion problem, the elevator-pitch test, the trust reservoir, and the compliant-opaque trap. The territory left is operational craft. This piece is about the part of the IR job most editors get wrong on Monday morning, every Monday morning, and why no amount of careful proofreading produces the artifact the company actually needs.

Here is a slide. You have seen it. It appears, in some variant, in nearly every Asian listed-company capital-markets-day deck:

Strategic Priorities — Drive operational excellence · Optimise capital allocation · Enhance shareholder value · Strengthen market position · Build organisational capability

An editor receives this slide and goes to work. Tighten the verbs. Make the bullets parallel. Fix the typography. Rephrase “drive” and “enhance” because they are doing no work.

The editor will improve the slide. The editor will also be editing the wrong thing.

This is the bit of the IR job that is genuinely funny once you have seen it a few times. The editor polishes for a living, takes pride in the polish, and never quite asks why every quarter produces another slide that needs the same polish. The slide is not the problem. The slide is the symptom.

Jon Moon’s diagnostic is the one that catches it: flabby information equals flabby thinking. And the principle runs in both directions, which is the part most readers miss.

The bidirectional bit

Read the principle both ways. Slowly.

If the slide is flabby, the analysis is flabby. That is the obvious direction. It is the one most experienced IR practitioners already accept, at least in private.

The other direction is the operational one. If the analysis is flabby, no amount of polishing will fix the slide. The two are entangled. You can rewrite the verbs, rebalance the layout, run it through three review cycles, and the slide will remain inert, because the work that should have produced a substantive slide has not been done.

This is what separates Moon from ordinary “write better” advice. Ordinary editing advice treats the slide as the unit of work. Moon treats the slide as a diagnostic instrument for the work upstream. The editor is reading the artifact for evidence of analytical completion, not for typographic infelicity.

If you run IR at a listed company, this is the move that changes the job. You stop polishing and start diagnosing.

What a flabby investor presentation looks like

Three patterns of flabbiness account for most of the damage. They are recognisable on sight once you know what you are looking at.

The first is the category claim masquerading as an essence claim. The “Strategic Priorities” slide above is the type specimen. Each bullet names a kind of work the company plans to do. None names the specific work. The bullets are interchangeable across companies and sectors. You could move this slide between a regional bank, a property developer, and a palm-oil company, and it would remain identically true. That is what makes it flabby. Its substance is independent of any specific situation. Minto named this failure more than forty years ago, and it is the same blank-assertion pattern that The Sentences That Sound Like Assertions dissected: the category offered where the content should be.

The second is the reconciliation gap. A headline metric appears that does not reconcile to its source inputs in one step. “Adjusted EBITDA improved 18% year-on-year.” The reader asks the obvious questions. Improved from what baseline? Adjusted for what? Driven by which line items? If the answer requires three additional slides of build-up, the headline metric is concealing analytical work that has not been done. Cunningham’s point on non-GAAP reporting is exactly this. The disciplined version reconciles in one step, in plain sight. The flabby version absorbs multi-step assumptions behind a single number and hopes nobody asks.

The third is aggregation-without-selection. A deck author given forty operational metrics produces forty slides because choosing which four actually matter would require analytical judgement the author does not feel authorised to make. The resulting deck is comprehensive and useless. Comprehensive because everything is present. Useless because nothing has been weighted, ranked, or argued for. The reader cannot tell what the company thinks matters, because the company has not yet decided.

All three patterns are surface symptoms of the same underlying issue: analytical work the writer skipped.

Three tests you can actually run

The craft literature on this is unusually consistent. The same three tests appear, in slightly different language, across the work that matters.

1. Test 1. Minto’s summary test. For each section of the document, write one sentence that captures the essence of the section rather than its category. The category-claim version reads as: “This section discusses our strategic priorities.” The essence-claim version reads as: “We will allocate $1.2 billion to upstream development, repay $400 million of debt, and maintain dividend coverage at 2.4x in 2026.” The first is a label on a folder. The second is an argument. If your summary reads as a label, the analysis underneath has not finished.
2. Test 2. Moon’s word-pair test. For each bullet, identify the noun and the verb. If the bullet is a noun phrase without a verb (“Operational excellence”; “Market leadership”; “Stakeholder engagement”), the bullet has not stated what the data means. It has named a category and stopped. Moon’s Words-in-Tables method gives the constructive form: bullets should be short sentences with verbs that do work, laid out in tables that surface relationships between them. Boring, mechanical, transformative.
3. Test 3. Cunningham’s reconciliation test. For each headline metric, ask whether it reconciles to its source inputs in one step. If it does not, the metric is concealing analytical work. This is the test the audit committee should run on every non-GAAP figure before it leaves the building. Most do not. It bites for the same reason the others do: it surfaces work the finance team has not yet done.

Three tests, three failure modes. Most flabby content fails at least one. Severe cases (most chairperson letters, most capital-markets-day cover decks, most “strategy update” slides) fail all three.

Where flabby investor presentations come from

Flabby artifacts have a common upstream cause. Analytical work that should have preceded the artifact has not been completed, and the artifact is acting as a substitute for the missing work. The slide is not flabby because the writer is bad. The slide is flabby because the writer is being asked to ship an artifact about a decision the management team has not yet made.

The pattern shows up in three recognisable shapes.

A management team that has not yet decided which three strategic priorities matter for the next year produces a five-bullet “Strategic Priorities” slide because the slide has to ship. The slide becomes the placeholder for the unmade decision. Subsequent quarters reference the slide, and the priorities continue to be deferred. The artifact is doing work the management team should be doing.

A deck-author handed forty operational metrics ships forty slides, because picking the four that matter would take analytical judgement nobody has authorised. Aggregation is safe. Selection means someone can be wrong about something specific. Everyone in the chain prefers the safe failure.

A finance team that has not yet specified the assumptions behind a non-GAAP metric publishes the number anyway, because the number has to appear in the release. The reconciliation slide is then either missing, vague, or quietly inconsistent across quarters. The artifact is again the placeholder for analytical work that has been deferred.

In every case, the editor confronted with the flabby output cannot remediate the underlying issue by editing. The editor can polish. The analytical work remains undone. Next quarter the same slide arrives with marginally different verbs.

If you have ever sat in a deck-review meeting where everyone agrees the deck is “almost there” for the fifth consecutive draft, this is what is happening.

The convergence, briefly

The three tests above each have an owner. The corroboration comes from everywhere else, and it is unusually consistent.

Baruch Lev’s empirical work on earnings calls is the cleanest external check. Calls heavy in filler content (words doing no work, qualifiers without commitment, aggregations without selection) produce negative abnormal returns relative to calls with substantive content. Flabby content is not just aesthetically weak. It has a measurable cost in market pricing.

The storytelling and practitioner traditions land in the same place — the Wall Street Journal finding Etzold and Ramge like to quote, that 84% of presentations are rated bad or very bad by their audiences, is the memorable data point. None of these writers set out to produce the same book. They converge on the same operational point. Once you accept that the artifact is a diagnostic instrument, the rest follows.

The reverse discipline

Here is the operational move.

When an IR editor receives a draft and recognises flabbiness, the correct first response is not editing. The correct first response is a diagnostic question: what analytical work has the writer skipped? The flabbiness is the surface. The missing work is the substance.

For each flabby passage, the editor asks four questions:

• What decision has not been made?
• What selection has not been performed?
• What interpretation has not been worked out?
• What reconciliation has not been published?

If the editor can identify the missing work, the next step is to surface the question to whoever owns it (finance, strategy, operations, the CFO directly) and request the completion. The artifact is then rewritten around the completed analysis, not edited around the flabby surface.

The artifact is doing work the management team should be doing.

This is uncomfortable. It requires the editor to operate as a diagnostic instrument for the upstream functions rather than as a polish layer for completed work. It often surfaces work the company would prefer not to do. Selecting three priorities forces tradeoffs the management team has been postponing. Reconciling the non-GAAP metric forces the assumptions to be made explicit. Identifying the four metrics that drive the equity story forces the strategy to be specified.

The discomfort is the price. The artifact that results from a completed analytical workflow is different in kind from the artifact that results from polishing flabby content. The first carries analytical work into the reader’s mind. The second carries the appearance of analytical work without the substance. Institutional readers can tell the difference. They may not say so. They will price it.

The Asian-market shape of the problem

The pattern manifests in three recognisable artifacts across Asian listed companies.

Capital-markets-day decks tend to the 60-to-100-slide format. The slide count is the symptom. The cause is aggregation-without-selection. The deck author has compiled every operational metric, every strategic initiative, every competitive positioning point, because performing the selection would require analytical judgement the author has not been given the authority to make. The deck that the equity story actually needs is closer to 20 slides. The other 60 are placeholder for unmade decisions.

Quarterly results decks tend to the KPI-wall format. Fifteen to thirty KPIs displayed at equal weight, with no slide identifying which three or four drove the quarter. The KPI wall is the same aggregation pathway in a different artifact. The reader cannot extract the company’s view of what mattered, because the company has not decided what mattered.

Annual reports tend to the comprehensive-everything format. The chairperson’s letter is the most diagnostic section. Most chairperson letters in Asian annual reports could be moved between companies and sectors without losing coherence, because they are constructed entirely from category claims. Read three of them next to each other and try to attribute them to their companies without the masthead. It is harder than it should be.

The reverse discipline applied to Asian materials surfaces the same diagnosis repeatedly. The artifact is not improvable through editing, because the analytical work has not been completed. The IR editor’s job, properly understood, is to surface this consistently to the C-suite. Most do not, because surfacing it means telling senior management that a decision they have been deferring is now blocking the deck. The result is a regional disclosure environment dominated by flabby artifacts that survive every internal review, because nobody in the production chain has the standing to require the analytical completion.

What to do on Monday morning

Pick up the next document the team produces and run the three tests on it.

The first iteration is uncomfortable. The fifth is normal. By the tenth, the upstream teams begin completing their work before sending drafts to IR, because they know the diagnostic will surface what is missing. That is the change you are trying to produce. The improved artifact is a side-effect.

The institutional incentives point the other way, which is why the polish layer persists. Editing-as-polish is stable, defensible, and produces an output every quarter that looks roughly like everyone else’s. Nobody has to ask the CFO which decision is still pending; the fifth “almost there” draft simply circulates again.

Build the reverse discipline into IR-editorial practice and the artifacts come out different — tighter, more specific, more analytically complete. Sophisticated readers notice. The pricing premium accrues quietly, and it pays for the analysis, not the polish.

You cannot edit your way out of bad analysis. But you can use the editing function to surface the analysis the company has been avoiding. That is the job.

That closes the bedrock companion series. The next piece in the body of work moves out of operational craft and into a broader disciplinary question, taken up in Where PR and IR Actually Meet. The two functions are adjacent, frequently confused, and structurally different in ways that matter for how a listed company organises its external-affairs work. We will take that one on its own terms.