Is Passion Linked With Stock Price? 

Jack Welch is a CEO’s CEO. Transforming GE into a performance machine that regularly churns out 27 per cent returns is a feat about which few other CEOs can boast. He also acts differently.  He’s not afraid to show how passionate he is about his company, his people and the limitless potential for change.  How comfortable are other CEOs with showing emotion?  Not very, according to our annual LanguageWorks for Business annual survey of CEO letters to shareholders.

Emotion is one of those soft things that aren’t supposed to be important in business.  Leaders are expected to make tough decisions based on hard analysis. Feelings are submerged because they complicate rather than facilitate progress. Our findings challenge this view. In fact, we found in our survey that the average stock prices of companies who use language to create emotion outperform those who do not.   

For three years running, we have analyzed the emotional content in over 300 CEO letters from Fortune 500 companies. In our review, we circle commonplace words like ‘exciting’, ‘proud’, and ‘confident’ and less common ones like, ‘love’, ‘fun’, and ‘frustrated.’ We found that 15 percent of the letters have no emotional words. What about the 85 percent of the letters that do?  Over half fail to use them in a context that conveys emotion to the reader. In other words, 61 percent of the letters we surveyed failed to pack any emotional punch.

What’s the difference between stating emotion and creating emotion?  When Donald Trump writes that his company is “very excited about the opportunity… to develop and manage a casino resort for the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians”, the emotion he describes just sits on the page.  In contrast, it’s easy to see, and even share, Jack Welch’s enthusiasm when he writes: “Our objective is to be the “global employer of choice,” and we are striving to create the exciting career opportunities for local leaders all over the world that will make this objective a reality. This initiative has taken us to within reach of one of our biggest and longest-running dreams — a truly global GE.” 

Scientists are discovering that our hearts have brains and actually emit more energy than our mind brains. CEOs like Jack Welch are tapping the power of both brains.  They show how this can make a difference in performance.