Deconstructing the double-speak of CEOs from Bill Gates to Jack Welch.
In a post-Enron world, corporate accountability and ethical behaviour have become increasingly important. Joel Amernic and Russell Craig consider the implications of the corporate language of leadership.
CEO-Speak explores the metaphors and persuasive strategies used by leaders at Enron, Microsoft, AOL-TimeWarner, General Electric, IBM, Nortel, Canadian National Railways, Andersen, Disney, and Alcan-Pechiney-Alusuisse. Amernic and Craig show that CEOs are frequently presented as heroes engaged in "the war of business" who can effect astonishing miracles of financial performance and reinvention. Contesting the notion that accounting is objective, CEO-Speak serves as an introduction to the controversies and ambiguities in corporate accountability and provides rich examples of the excesses of corporate communication.
Details
256 Pages, 6 x 9
ISBN 9780773533202
September 2007
Formats: Paperback, Cloth, eBook
"In a world increasingly focused on accountability, Amernic and Craig argue for more monitoring of the written and spoken words of CEOs." MacLean's
"CEO-Speak paints an unflattering picture of self-appointed 'Midases' and 'warrior chiefs' with a proclivity for offering a selective, if not deceptive, take on the facts. The book ... could not have come at a more relevant time for executives, especially in Canada." The Globe & Mail
"CEO-Speak provides glimpses of hidden corporate strategies. Without meaning to, and often more by omission than direct statement, the CEOs reveal a great deal about their attitudes toward their own corporations, its employees and shareholders, and the societies in which these huge conglomerates operate." Peter Desbarats, professor emeritus, former dean of the graduate school of journalism, University of Western Ontario
"Amernic and Craig's book is not only an excellent addition to this body of research; it makes a unique contribution by showing how accounting and rhetoric combine in the written discourse of CEOs"Anish M. Dave, Iowa State University, Journal of Business and Technical Communication
CEO-SpeakJoel Amernic and Russell CraigJournal of Business and Technical Communication - Review Speak: The Language of Corporate Leadership is a study of the written discourse of CEOs that is found in annual reports, corporate Web sites, congressional testimonies, and employee newsletters. The book contains 10 case studies of CEOs’ writings from past and present megacorporations, including Enron, General Electric, Microsoft, Disney, and AOL. The organizations covered in the book represent both new and old economies and include two Canadian companies and a public-sector company. The authors, Joel Amernic and Russell Craig, are accounting and business professors and appropriately focus on accounting and financial reporting aspects of CEOs’ written discourse. The authors claim to address two “under-examined aspects” of these texts: (a) the relationship between CEOs’ written discourse and their companies’ financial reporting and (b) the ideological, rhetorical, and metaphorical nature of CEO written discourse (p. 5). According to the authors, the written discourse of CEOs should be examined because of the substantial impact such texts have on their companies’ stakeholders. Although scholars in rhetoric and professional communication have studied the impact of the written discourse of CEOs, much of this scholarship has focused on surface-level textual or visual features, with occasional references to context. My own survey of recent literature on such discourse in rhetoric and professional communication revealed a range of studies. For example, Prasad and Mir (2002) found that letters written by U.S. oil company CEOs between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s invoked the metaphor of orientalism to blame the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries for the domestic problems facing the U.S. companies. David (2001) reported how organizational writers use verbal and visual designs to create positive myths about their organizations and their CEOs. Crombie and Samujh (1999) analyzed a CEO letter that used negative themes to divert stockholders’ attention from more pressing problems facing the company. Hyland (1998) examined 137 CEO letters to show how metadiscourses in these letters enhanced the writers’ appeal. And Kohut and Segars (1992) found a strong correlation between themes emphasized in the letters of CEOs and their companies’ performance. Amernic and Craig’s book is not only an excellent addition to this body of research; it makes a unique contribution by showing how accounting and rhetoric combine in the written discourses of CEOs, a merger that the authors call “the rhetoric of accounting” (p. 36). The first case studies in the book, on Enron and its auditing firm Arthur Andersen (chapters 2 and 3), are perhaps the most telling examples of “the rhetoric of accounting.” In chapter 2, Amernic and Craig analyze the last letter written by Enron’s CEO, Jeffrey Skilling, and its chairman, Kenneth Lay, to the company’s stockholders before the company filed for bankruptcy in December 2001. Using a framework of ideology, rhetoric, and metaphor, Amernic and Craig show how the letter uses militaristic metaphors and creates an infallible image of Enron as a company. The most striking militaristic metaphor used in the letter, according to Amernic and Craig, is the phrase “laser-focused on earnings per share” (p. 22). They criticize the phrase for its implicit obsession with an accounting ratio that essentially measures only past performance. They also criticize Skilling and Lay for crediting Enron with “unlimited” ability to use its markets advantageously. Commenting on Skilling and Lay’s unqualified estimation of Enron’s abilities, Amernic and Craig remark, “Yet, just about anyone who has been in business knows that markets are fickle” (p. 26). They follow up their remark by wondering whether Lay and Skilling were overconfident about Enron’s abilities to maneuver markets because they were “caught up” in their own delusional beliefs or because they had “turned a blind eye” (p. 26) to the dangers facing Enron. In chapter 3, Amernic and Craig show how the testimony of Arthur Andersen CEO Joseph Berardino, who testified before Congress in December 2001 in connection with the Enron scandal, advanced the notions that accounting and auditing were (a) just one aspect of a multidimensional failure of Enron and (b) complex subjects not easily grasped by nonaccountants (and therefore, by implication, by those hearing the testimony). They point out how the CEO, after warning his lay audience that accounting concepts were hard to follow, proceeded to do exactly what he should have avoided in such a situation; he couched his explanations to his audience in highly technical accounting terms. CEO texts available on the Web form the subject of chapters 4, 5, and 6. Microsoft’s Web site is the first to be examined (chapter 4) for its use of metaphorical, rhetorical, and ideological strategies. Amernic and Craig criticize the company’s annual report on the Web site for its use of pictures (pictures, they note, have “since been removed”), calling them a “distraction from the sequentiality of the users’ ingestion of the report” (p. 47). I would posit, however, that the lack of sequentiality (or the nonlinearity of presentation) is a defining feature of the Web in general. Next, Amernic and Craig criticize the presentation of Bill Gates’s letter in Microsoft’s online annual report. The letter features an informal heading, “Bill’s Letter,” along with a picture of a smiling Bill Gates (p. 48). The combination of the informal heading and photo in the letter, according to Amernic and Craig, may bias the readers of the annual report, making them gloss over the important details in the report that follows the letter. Surprisingly, however, Amernic and Craig fail to include, either in an appendix or in the chapter itself, the full text of Gates’s letter. In chapter 5, Amernic and Craig criticize AOL-Time Warner’s Internet policy statement for presuming authority over a public medium such as the Internet. They question whether large media organizations should give us guidelines over the uses of the Internet. From issues of public policy about new media, Amernic and Craig turn, in chapter 6, to the basics of accounting and financial reporting, analyzing IBM’s online “Guide to Understanding Financials,” a report intended for shareholders and employees alike. They criticize the guide for its simplistic nature, including its failure to alert the audience about some of the basic accounting concepts, such as the difference between long-term and current assets, accrual versus cash-based accounting, and so on. Amernic and Craig argue that the guide reduces accounting, a complex and ambiguous subject, to mere rules and formulas. This reductionism, they claim, deceives readers and hence affects their decision making. Another problem with the guide, according to Amernic and Craig, is its misleading use of visual metaphors. For example, the hyperlinks in the guide follow this sequence: earnings statement, balance sheet, and cash-flow statement. Amernic and Craig argue that if the sequence denotes order of importance, then the guide may mislead readers because of “the increasing emphasis in financial accounting
Joel Amernic is professor, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto.
Russell Craig is professor, National Graduate School of Management, Australian National University.
CEO-Speak
Joel Amernic and Russell Craig
Table of Contents
vii
Introduction ix
1 Why the Words of Business Leaders Matter 3
2 Hyperbole and Delusion at Enron 18
3 Framing Andersen 28
4 The Gates to Microsoft: Exploiting Web Sites 39
5 AOLTimeWarner: Claiming the Internet Kingdom 51
6 IBM and the Privileges of an Internet Soapbox 65
7 Constructing Jack Welch, GE’s Corporate Chieftain Incarnate 74
8 Disney’s Narrative as Personality Prism 87
9 Nortel’s “Remarkable” Letter 101
10 Three Tenors in Perfect Harmony 116
11 Creating “North America’s Railroad” 124
12 Towards Greater Accountability for CEO-Speak 137
APPENDICES
1 Skilling and Lay’s Last Letter to Shareholders of Enron 147
2 Remarks of Joseph F. Berardino, Managing Partner/CEO of Andersen, to the us House of Representatives Committee on Financial Services, 12 December 2001 153
3 AOLTimeWarner’s Internet Policy Statement 165
4 General Electric’s 1991 ceo Letter to Shareholders 174
5 Letter to Stockholders, 1940 Walt Disney Productions’ Annual Report 184
6 Letter to Stockholders, 1941 Walt Disney Productions’ Annual Report 191
Notes 199
References 223
Index 237