Call it ticker shock. For more than a generation, senior executives everywhere have been obsessed with corporate share prices. During the US leveraged-buyout craze of the 1980s, the mere scent of an undervalued stock would bring corporate predators circling around. Over the past decade, as the ranks of investors have grown and increasing numbers of companies have used shares as the currency for M&A, share prices have assumed an ever larger role in strategic planning. And what senior executive has never claimed that the stock market undervalues or "doesn't appreciate" his or her company? If only it had different investors or if analysts understood it better, the complaint goes, its share price would be higher.

To push it higher, CEOs and CFOs spend more and more time communicating with investors. But the approach is typically ad hoc: executives get their advice from investor relations consultants, whose backgrounds are more likely to be in PR than in finance. Academics have only recently begun to research the composition of the investor community and communications with it. Advice from bankers is largely anecdotal. No surprise, then, that executives often admit to being dissatisfied with the time they spend communicating with investors and with...