There was a time (the 1980s and 1990s) when it seemed easy for executives to please Wall Street. That hasn't been true for a while. The stock market has become an unforgiving place, and dealing with dissatisfied investors part of the daily job of CEOs, CFOs and investor-relations executives.

There are right ways and many, many wrong ways to face an angry mob. Nobody knows them better than Baruch Lev. He's done the research. He's analyzed the data. And he has developed a set of authoritative, often surprising instructions for dealing intelligently with Wall Street.

This book tells what to do when your company disappoints investors, gets slammed by financial analysts, or finds itself mired in lawsuits all of which have a negative effect not just on stock prices but on employee recruitment (who wants to work for a losing company?), consumer behavior (who wants to buy a major product of a failing firm?), and supply chain development (who wants to partner with a troubled enterprise?).

Stripped of cliches and emotional arguments, and backed up by extensive research by Lev and other finance scholars, the book amounts to an indispensable capital-markets operating manual for executives. And its overarching message is an inspiring and perhaps surprising one: Honesty turns out to good for business.

Baruch Lev is the Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance at New York University’s Stern School of Business and the director of both the Vincent C. Ross Institute for Accounting Research and the Project for Research on Intangibles. He is a permanent visitor at École Nationale Des Ponts and Chaussées (Paris) and City University Business School (London).