How do Tech Leaders Communicate? Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis of Jeff Bezos’ Shareholder Letter, Jack Ma’s Retirement Speech and Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech

What are we Doing and Why?

In our quest of analyzing the communication styles of technology leaders, especially Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma and Steve Jobs, we examined the speeches/letters delivered/written from these tech leaders, one from each. To do so, we performed text analytics and sentiment analysis on R*. Since these unstructured data are a great source of exploring one’s underlying emotions, attitudes and sentiments, these analyses helped us get one step closer into understanding the communication styles of tech leaders. In this blog, we will share our findings.

Sentiment Analysis. Picture Credit: Devopedia

What are we Analyzing?

We are analyzing Jeff Bezos’ shareholder letter, Jack Ma’s retirement speech and Steve Jobs’ Stanford commencement speech. We selected them because Bezos places very high importance on these letters to communicate with Amazon’s shareholders, Ma’s retirement speech is the most recent and an important speech of his career, and Jobs’ speech is still considered one of the most inspiring speeches till date.

Since these letters/speeches are targeted to a different set of audience, are delivered with a different goal, and are created for different contexts, they all contain a different combination of emotions, varying levels of sentiments and variety of word usage. However, these different approaches fit well with their target audience, goals and contexts. This shows that these technology leaders are skillful communicators. 

Text Analytics and Sentiment Analysis

Jeff Bezos’ Shareholder Letter, 2018:

Jeff Bezos

In his letter, Bezos talked about Amazon.com’s accomplishments, value-creation for customers, their future investments and the associated risks, as well as competition. Based off that, our analysis generated the following results:

Left: Wordcloud, Right: Word Frequency

Wordcloud and Word Frequency figures show that Jeff Bezos used the word “Customer” most of the time. Since, customers are the center of Amazon’s operations, no wonder the word dominated the shareholder letter! In fact, using the word “Customer” most frequently reiterates the mission of the company—“To become the earth’s most customer-centric company”. Similarly, words such as “invest”, “employee”, “learn”, “work”, and “continue” are also frequently used. It shows that a growing company like Amazon is still hungry to continue to grow bigger and better. This is a positive indication for shareholders— the target audience.

Sentiment Analysis

Similarly, the emotional and sentiment analyses show that Bezos’ letter was positive, filled with the emotions of trust, joy and anticipation, all the elements that a good shareholder letter should contain. It is, however, interesting to note that the letter does have some emotions of sadness and fear, which could probably be an outcome of talks of uncertainties or risks of investments, or even competition.

Overall, this was a very skillfully crafted letter.

Jack Ma’s Retirement Speech:

Jack Ma Performing at his Retirement Concert. PC: Google

Ma, in his speech, talked about the success of Alibaba, smooth transition of new executive, and culture of talent development. Since this was the speech where he introduced the new CEO, it was a very brilliant move of him to focus his speech on organizational culture, rather than himself. This helped to generate positive sentiment among audience regarding the company’s future despite him not being there anymore.

This can also be seen in the results below:

Left: Wordcloud, Right: Word Frequency

Most of the words used in his speech were “company”, “system”, “talent”, “partnership”, “develop”, and “success”. The goal of his speech was to keep up the confidence of people on the company, irrelevant of who was/not the CEO. Therefore, the speech was able to instill positive sentiments among people even though this was a sad moment for many.

Sentiment Analysis

In fact, Ma’s speech scored very low on sadness and surprisingly scored high on trust, anticipation and joy. This illustrates amazing communication skills of Ma. Although this was an emotional event for himself, he was still able to shift the focus of audience on brighter future of the company.

Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech:

Jobs’ commencement speech featured the stories of his failure and success. He talked about his college life, being kicked out of the company he founded— Apple, and his fight against cancer. It was delivered to inspire the audience; that one can be successful despite the adversaries.

Left: Wordcloud, Right: Word Frequency

Since the speech was delivered to fresh graduates, words such as “college”, “life”, “graduate”, “love”, “connect” and “adopt” were frequently used. He used a philosophical/rhetorical approach to communicate the importance of taking charge of one’s life, to keep going despite the challenges, and to be hungry for knowledge.

Sentiment Analysis

Similarly, since this was a graduation speech, which is an emotional event for many, Jobs’ speech was also constructed to compliment the nature of the event. This allowed him to connect with his audience to a greater level. In fact, he scored high on all the ten sentiments/emotions, as compared against Bezos and Ma. Interestingly, it was probably his stories of failure that led him to score high on sadness, fear and anger.

Finally, it was the charisma of Jobs that he was able to communicate even the most personal details and difficult stories with such demeanor.

In Conclusion,

All the technology leaders featured in this blog post are excellent communicators. Their effective communication skills help them to become successful leaders. And, although all of them are storytellers, they have different communication styles. Whatsoever, since these tech leaders understand their target audience, are aware of the contexts where they are communicating, and have a clear goal in mind, they are able to adapt their communication styles as needed. This is the most important ingredient for becoming a successful communicator. We hope you are able to learn this lesson from our blog. 

*Since R-codes are out of scope for this blog, I haven't attached them here. But if you need them, please comment or send me an e-mail.