03rd September 2010 | Posted in Management

The Economist drew attention to some work from Stanford the other day – “How to tell when your boss is lying”. The researchers analysed the transcripts of 30,000 (yes, 30,000) conference calls from American CEOs and CFOs with corporate investors and looked for the verbal traits common to those who were subsequently discovered to be, shall we say, ‘overstating’ the financial prospects of their organisations.

Tell-tale signs for those uttering untruths were an increased use of generalisations: “as you know..”, “it’s a well-known fact that…”, and so on.  Less “ums” and “errs” were found in the deceivers as they presumably tried to sound fully confident in their data and the first person “I” was largely replaced by the third person “we” in what would seem to be an attempt to diffuse accountability for the untruth, however subconsciously. The researchers also found an unsurprising tendency to hyperbole: corporate performance was more likely to be “fantastic” than “good”, for example, and liars were more inclined to swear than those comfortable with their presentation.

Sadly, this doesn’t really help because the researchers were not able to tell us the most important thing of all – which of those Company Officers were not ‘lying’ because they believed their own untruths and which were deliberately aiming to deceive? Bob Sutton writes in his new book ‘Good boss, bad boss’ about the tricky idea that a decent leader is simultaneously confident and open to the idea that they might be wrong: what he calls ‘confident but not really sure’ and ‘strong opinions, weakly held’. Given the context of the researched calls it is easy to see that the expectation of the investors for confidence from the CEO or CFO would drive a confident performance, even if they were deceiving themselves as much as their audience.

Reassuringly for me, on my writing course, I teach that “I” is better than the third person in writing for business; I teach that generalisations aren’t worth the number of words that you have to write to justify them and I teach that hyperbole makes a writer sound untrustworthy. I’ve never taught people not to swear in print so perhaps I should give that some thought. Meanwhile, every PR worth their fee is coaching their client away from these ‘tells’ even as I write so its obvious to all of us that we need to move fantastically quickly to make the most of this before the buggers catch up.