An honest signal is not “our margin will be 15 percent next year” but “our average margin was 12 percent over the last ten years”; an honest signal is not “we will have robust free cash flows starting two years from now” but “we generated free cash flow only one year in the last decade”; an honest signal is not “we will launch six new products next year” but “in our recent history, we have launched an average of one product every two years.” No stories, no projections, just facts about the past.
