CEO-Speak ─ The Language of Corporate Leadership

Through a rhetorical analysis of the speeches and letters of chief executive officers from Bill Gates to Jack Welch, annual reports to shareholders, press releases, and company newsletters and Websites, Joel Amernic and Russell Craig show that CEOs are elitist exclusionary propagators of an often biased stream of discourse. They examine the Internet as a powerful new platform for CEO-speak and find that the language of CEOs evokes an ideology of neo-liberalism, extreme individualism, hyper-competition, and global capitalism. Raising alarm bells regarding the ethos of corporate leadership, the authors urge the business press, academia, and the accounting and auditing community to take a more critical approach toward corporations.