Lauder, Faster, Funnier

Estee Lauder CEO and founder's grandson William Lauder uses an otherwise demure Q&A with the WSJ's Ellen Byron to exercise his irritation with the provincial tendencies of the analyst community.

"There's a generic frustration that I have when I talk to the financial community. The vast majority of analysts we talk to are American, the vast majority of them don't travel much outside of the U.S., and if they do, I imagine that most of that travel isn'' to figure out how our brands and other brands are sold and marketed in Europe or Asia. They seem singularly obsessed with North America and the success of the Clinique and Estee Lauder brands there. They miss the extraordinary growth and expansion that we're seeing from our brands outside of this market. More than half of our sales and a significant portion of our total growth will come from outside of North America."

Lauder must have been looking for an opportunity to less loose on the subject, given that his jab was in response to the question, "What retail alternatives are particularly attractive for your brands right now?"

But Lauder is hardly the first CEO to express such annoyance. Jack has heard more than one boss complain that the analyst community is not even just U.S.-centric, but actually Manhattan-centric.