A letter from the president: seduction, charm and obfuscation in French CEO letters

摘要

CEO letters have become a systematic, almost ritualized object of study in academic and professional circles. Their importance has grown with the World Wide Web. They play a notable public relations role, announcing important events, justifying actions and decisions and offering attempts at legitimisation. They define the vision that business leaders desire to share with - or very often impose on - their recipients. The CEO letter to shareholders can be a subtly revealing medium for understanding how a company works and the vision it has of itself, as well as the vision it wants to present to others. In this unavoidable exercise of the annual report - which applies whatever the size, industrial sector, or turnover of a company - company heads use two or three pages to get across their different viewpoints. This article assesses CEO letters from two perspectives, theoretical and practical. Management literature on the subject is not abundant and tends to concentrate on the cognitive dimension, aiming at detailing and interpreting content. We propose to explore studies on this topic of research and specify methodological considerations. A third section of the paper is devoted to a critical analysis of results obtained through the "de-coding" of letters by CAC40 company heads.