The Twelve Days of Christmas refers to an ancient festive season which begins on December 25. Colonial Americans modified this a bit by creating wreaths which they hung on neighbors’ doors on December 24 in anticipation of starting the festival of twelve days, which historically included feasts and celebrations.

Better known is the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas” which is believed to  have started as a French folk rhyme, then later published in 1780 England.  The song commemorates the twelve days of Christmas by offering ever grander gifts on each day of the holiday season.

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So, it being Christmas Eve I am stealing this idea completely and offering my list of the 12 gifts investors would like to receive this holiday season from the companies into which they invest:

  1. Stop waxing eloquently about what you did last year or quarter.  Yesterday has come and gone.  Tell me about the future.
  2. Tell me about important trends that are going to impact your business.  Is it demographics, aging population, the ecology movement, digitization, regulatory change, organic foods, mobility, mobile payments, nanotech, biotech… ?  What are the critical trends that will impact your business going forward?
  3. Tell me your future scenarios.  How will these trends change the way your customers and your company will behave?  What are your most likely scenarios (and don’t try to be creative in an effort to preserve the status quo!)
  4. Tell me how the game will change for your industry over the next 1, 3, and 5 years.  How will things be different for the industry, based on the trends and scenarios.  The world is a fast changing place, and I want to know how this will change your industry.
  5. Tell me about the customers you lost last year.  I gain no value from hearing about, or from, your favorite customers that love what currently do.  Instead, bring me info on the customers who are buying alternative products, changing their behaviors, in ways that might impact sales.  Even if these changes are only a small percentage of revenue.
  6. Tell me who the competitors are that are trying to change the game.  Don’t tell me that these companies will fail.  Tell me who the folks are that are really trying to do something new and different.
  7. Tell me about the fringe competitors.  The ones you constantly say do not matter because they are small, or not part of the historical industry, or from some distant location where you don’t now compete.  Tell me about the companies doing the new things which are seen as remote and immaterial, but are nibbling at the edges of the market.
  8. Tell me how you are reacting to potential game changers in your market.  What are your plans to deal with disruptive competitors and disruptive innovations affecting your way of doing business?  Other than working harder, faster, cheaper and planning to do better, what are you planning to do differently?
  9. Tell me how you intend to be a market game changer.  Tell me what you intend to do that aligns with trends and leads the company toward fulfilling future scenarios as a market leader.
  10. Tell me what projects you are undertaking to experiment with new forms of competition, attracting new customers and creating new markets. Tell me about your teams that are working in white space to discover new opportunities.
  11. Tell me how you will disrupt your own organization so the constant effort to enhance the old success formula doesn’t kill any effort to do something new and different.  How will you keep these experimental white space teams from being killed, or simply starved of resources, by the organizational inertia to defend and extend the status quo.
  12. Tell me the goals of these project teams, and how they will be nurtured and supplemented, as well as evaluated, to lead the company in new directions.  Don’t just tell me that you will measure sales or profits, but rather real goals that measure market learning and ability to understand new customer behaviors.

If investors had this transparency, rather than merely reams and reams of historical data, just imagine how much smarter we could all invest.

Happy Holidays!