CEO Barometer

The barometer measures change in the tone of CEO communication, not absolute truth. Each company's CEO review in its earnings releases (in the US, management's letter to shareholders) is scored on six tone dimensions: confidence, demand, profitability, growth ambition, caution and external blame. The last two are inverse: a high number means heavy hedging or attributing weakness to external factors, which lowers the index, so they are shown inverted as Directness (11 − caution) and Ownership (11 − external blame): in every column 10 is the best and greenest. Every company is always scored on all six dimensions, so staying silent on risks does not inflate the index. Quotes in the cards are verified word for word against the original report; the comments explain the score but do not set it. A second, independent model rates the same text without seeing the scores, and a cell is marked ◆ when the two differ by three points or more and land in different colour bands. Quotes from Finnish and Swedish reports come from the company's English report when one exists, otherwise they are marked as translations. The scale runs from 0 to 100, and 50 = the average tone of Nordic companies in 2020–2023. US companies are shifted down 9 points, because their management letters are systematically more positive as a genre than Nordic CEO reviews. The method is locked (version ceo-tone-v4); any change is published as a new version.

How the barometer worksFor media: figures, charts and citing