competition rolls on, page-114

From today's CBD:

"SHIFTY LOOKS

Apparently there is a nifty way to work out whether a chief executive is being slightly dodgy in his or her conduct. The University of Victoria (aka Footscray) yesterday released the findings of a study which found that the ''tone and choice of words in financial reports'' could signal whether a company was being deceptive.

The study focused on the Indian IT firm Satyam, which collapsed after its chairman, Ramalinga Raju, confessed to playing around with about $1 billion worth of numbers.

Apparently there were several linguistic ''alarm bells'' in the five Satyam annual reports before the company's collapse.

They included a shift from first person singular pronouns (I, me, mine) to plural pronouns (we, us, ours) and to a dominant positive tone. There was also a tendency to use positive emotion words and a reluctance to use numerical terms.

In non-academic surroundings, these ''alarm bells'' can usually be detected with the use of instruments called BS detectors."

My BS detector is worn out from reading TZL's material.