Once again, AAPL shows us how its done...

I'll keep this post short, as I know most of you are probably tired of hearing more news about Apple and the speculation surrounding its future leadership issues (i.e. the future of Mr. Jobs).

As both a small personal shareholder and a recent Apple convert (full disclosure), I took a few minutes today to listen in on the AAPL's quarterly earnings call. While some of it was sheer curiosity about the leadership issues and speculation, I was more curious as to how they would narrate their performance over the past quarter, and their ability to stick to the results message amidst the obvious distractions.

My opinion- home run! Sure, its easy to succeed on a call like that when some of your products and markets are growing at 50-100% year on year. But this call had a lot of potential to get derailed, not only by the leadership risks and concerns, but also by an analyst community who is so good at casting doubt and throwing darts wherever they can. Even the friendliest of wall street analysts can put a damper on good news.

Sometimes, we get so caught up in the management of the day to day business that we fail to see the importance of the stakeholder communications aspect of our activities and role. Yet it is THAT phase of performance management where the value of our efforts actually gets produced, and failing to tell the "performance story" can be just as damaging as failing to achieve the results. Today, that story was told to perfection.

Don't neglect the stakeholder communication aspect of your EPM processes, as it is probably the most valuable of all activities and has the potential to make or break your efforts!

The link to the audio of the call is no longer available (the archive should be up within a week or so). I'll try and post it when it goes back up.

-b