What keeps business leaders up at night?
For this month’s issue wealth Analytics has partnered with the Diligent Institute, the research arm of Diligent, a global leader in modern governance providing SaaS solutions for governance, risk, compliance, audit and ESG. Diligent gave us exclusive access to the raw data powering their corporate sentiment tracker. To create this tracker, they continually search the web for executive statements and reports from more than 1,489 publicly traded companies. The power of the tool, of course, is in assessing how business leaders are feeling overall.
knowing the numbers
10
- … The number of terms that made the top 100 (ie, the 100 terms most used by business leaders) in each of the last 36 months. These terms are: change, China, Business, future, growth, India, markets, persons, strategyand warns.
24
- … The number of months in the last three years 5G was among the top 100 most used terms by business leaders.
25
- … The number of consecutive months that inflation was among the top 100 terms used by business leaders. This series dates back to December 2020.
big picture
- Heading into 2023, business leaders are feeling a little uncomfortable. Last month, 52% of public statements by company leaders had a negative connotation (see second chart below). That compares to 45% in November 2021 and 29% in November 2020. Much of this is likely due to stubborn inflation and increased chances of a recession.
A few deeper takeaways
1. Twitter storms up the charts.
While corporate leaders are notorious for avoiding the media spotlight, Elon Musk not only chased it, he seemingly loved every second of it. At least he did before 2022. In recent months, Musk’s turbulent takeover of Twitter has tarnished the innovator’s public image and become a topic of interest for other CEOs. In fact, for the past month, Twitter has been the #7 most-used term in public statements by business leaders.
2. CEOs talk a lot about inflation – that’s not good.
Diligent researchers not only calculated the terms most commonly used by executives, but also performed a statistical calculation to assess whether the term was used positively or negatively.
Some things like “inflation” and “FTX” implying a negative message are obvious. Others are somewhat surprising, including the fact that when corporate leaders talk about “Apple” it almost always carries a negative connotation.
3. Rhetorically speaking, CEOs remain somewhat pessimistic.
On paper, the US economy remains fairly strong (barring rate-sensitive sectors like real estate and technology). The unemployment rate is below 4% while corporate earnings and retail sales remain resilient.
However, corporate leaders appear to be preparing for turbulent times in 2023. Case in point: look at how many times they talked about “recession” throughout the year.
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