CEOs Want to be Understood. No Really, because it Increases Firm Value

Have you ever noticed how talkative CEOs are and how they jump at opportunities to explain their firm, its products, and its markets to all sorts of media? Perhaps you thought that was because they have sizable egos that need to be maintained by seeing themselves in prominent media outlets. Perhaps you are right. But there is also something else going on, something that is quite important for stock market valuations of firms, and something that we have been doing research on.

Firms differ in how easy they are to understand. Now, I am not talking about their customers. Firms with products and services that customers find hard to understand will not be around for long. If the world had been filled with people like me, bubble tea outlets would not exist – I truly don’t understand them. But firms can offer a lot of products that each is easy to understand for the customer, but those who assess their management – especially security analysts who recommend investments to equity holders – may still find the combination hard to understand.

Usually, we think of firms that operate in multiple industries as being hard to understand, unless there is some obvious connection between the industries, and indeed single-industry firms generally have higher valuations in the stock market. But industries are an old-fashioned way of looking at modern firms. Apple are in many industries, but we see them as coherent because most of their products are easy-to-use and stylish lifestyle offerings to individuals, and their offering to firms (like iCloud) overlap with their offerings to individuals.  

The keyword is “we see them as coherent”, which means that Apple presents a story to the world that is generally accepted and that lets security analysts recommend them to investors. In research published in Organization Science, Sang Won Han and I found that this holds for firms in general, and it had some interesting implications. First, we were able to measure how well firm self-description and analyst understanding matched, and we showed the consequences of mismatch. It led to lower valuation, and worse penalty for operating in multiple industries. We also showed how this could change over time. Firm self-descriptions could bring analyst understanding closer, improving valuation, but the central mover in this connection remained the analyst.

So regardless of why CEOs want to talk, we know it is useful. The stock market valuation of a firm is not only about value creation; it is also about story creation.

Han SW, Greve HR. 2025. The Categorical Imperative vs. Linguistic Alignment: Organizations Use Language to Modify Environmental Expectations. Organization Science forthcoming.