The earnings game. Everyone plays, nobody wins

Quarterly earnings numbers dominate the decisions of executives, analysts, investors, and auditors. Yet for all the attention paid to these numbers, they're not much use in predicting a company's future performance and cash flows. Even economists are unanimous in their view that these numbers say next to nothing about a company's prospects beyond the next quarter. Nonetheless, meetings analysts' expectations that earnings will rise in a smooth, steady, unbroken line has become, at many corporations, a game whose imperatives override even the imperative to deliver the highest possible return to shareholders. The fetishistic attention paid to this almost meaningless indicator might be cause for amusement, except for one thing: the earnings game does real harm. It distorts corporate decision making. It reduces securities analysis and investing to a guessing contest. It compromises the integrity of corporate audits. Ultimately, it undermines the capital markets. As market participants increasingly come to view the quarterly number as a sort of collective fiction, offered and received in a spirit of mutual cynicism, they lose faith in the numbers affected by quarterly earnings--including stock prices themselves. And no market can survive long if its participants see no connection between prices and the intrinsic value of the goods on offer. In this article, HBR senior editor Harris Collingwood takes an in-depth look at these effects, examining the intricacies of the earnings game and why companies believe they have no choice but to play it. Until more corporate executives change their practices, he explains, the earning game will never lack for players.