For this month’s difficulty, Fortune Analytics partnered with Diligent Institute, the analysis arm of Diligent, a worldwide chief in fashionable governance offering SaaS options throughout governance, threat, compliance, audit and ESG. Diligent granted us unique entry to the uncooked knowledge that powers their Corporate Sentiment Tracker. To construct that tracker, they repeatedly scrape the online for government statements and information protection of greater than 1,489 public firms. The facility of the device is, after all, assessing how enterprise leaders in mixture are feeling.
The numbers to know
10
- … The variety of phrases that had been among the many high 100 (i.e. the 100 phrases used most regularly by company leaders) in every of the previous 36 months. These phrases are: change, China, economic system, future, progress, India, markets, individuals, technique, and warns.
24
- … The variety of months over the previous three years that 5G was among the many 100 most used phrases by company leaders.
25
- … The variety of consecutive months that inflation was among the many 100 most used phrases by company leaders. That streak dates again to December 2020.
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- Heading into 2023, company leaders are feeling a bit uneasy. Final month, 52% of company leaders’ public statements had a detrimental connotation (see the second chart under). That compares to 45% in November 2021 and 29% in November 2020. A variety of it will possibly possible be chalked as much as cussed inflation and elevated recession odds.
A couple of deeper takeaways
1. Twitter soars up the charts.
Whereas company leaders are infamous for avoiding media highlight, Elon Musk has not solely chased it but additionally, seemingly, liked each second of it. Effectively, a minimum of he did earlier than 2022. In latest months, Musk’s turbulent takeover of Twitter has muddied the innovator’s public picture and turn out to be a subject of curiosity for fellow CEOs. Actually, final month Twitter was the No.7 mostly used time period in company leaders’ public statements.
2. CEOs are speaking rather a lot about inflation—that’s not a great factor.
Not solely did researchers at Diligent calculate the phrases most regularly utilized by executives, in addition they ran a statistical calculation to guage if the time period had a constructive—or detrimental—utilization.
Some issues, like “inflation” and “FTX” implying a detrimental message, are apparent. Others are a bit shocking, together with the truth that when company leaders discuss “Apple” it nearly all the time has a detrimental connotation.
3. Rhetoric clever, CEOs stays considerably bearish.
On paper, the U.S. economic system (outside of rate sensitive sectors like housing and tech) stays pretty sturdy. The jobless fee is underneath 4%, whereas company earnings and retail gross sales proceed to be resilient.
That mentioned, company leaders look like making ready for uneven waters in 2023. Working example: Simply take a look at how usually they talked about “recession” all year long.
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