Evaluating assertions by a Wells Fargo CEO of a ‘return to ethical conduct’

High profile rhetorical events

Providing testimony before a Senate (or similar government investigating) committee is a serious, high-profile endeavour, with major reputational consequences. This seriousness was captured by Rohrer and Vignone (2012: 8–9) in their commentary on the appearance by five major bank CEOs before investigating committees of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and the Financial Crises Inquiry Commission after the global financial crisis of 2007–2009. They concluded that the testimonies of the bank CEOs ‘were carefully crafted to paint their banks’ actions in the best light possible and to minimize any potential consequences [such as] increased regulatory scrutiny to criminal charges … [and] to preserve their own best interests …’. Giglioni (2019: 110) observes that the opening witness statements in Congressional hearings

…seem to trigger a process of ethos building for self-defense … [and] provide both witnesses and committees’ members with high profile moments … [to] use their argumentation to set out their ideology, enabling them to engage with an increasingly wide and varied audience.

The appearance of a CEO before a Congressional or parliamentary committee is not something limited to the United States. For example, on 10 February 2009, four senior executives of major banks appeared before the Banking Crisis Inquiry of the Treasury Committee of the UK House of Commons to explain the failures of their banks (Tourish and Hargie, 2012). As another example, Rupert Murdoch, Chairman and CEO of News Corporation, appeared before the UK House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee on 19 July 2011 to respond to questions regarding serious allegations of phone-hacking involving journalists and managers of News Corporation’s London-based News of the World newspaper (Amernic and Craig, 2013). The UK parliamentary committee concluded strongly that Murdoch ‘exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications. … [and] is not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company’ (House of Commons Culture, Media & Sport Committee, 2012: 70).

Such appearances by corporate leaders attract intense media and public attention (Hargie et al., 2010). They are serious public events. Giglioni (2019: 110), for example, observed that ‘Congressional hearings … are widely reported on the front pages of the American press and increasingly accessed in their digital version’.

Sloan’s appearance in October 2017 was rendered of even higher interest by his predecessor’s (Stumpf’s) lacklustre appearance before the same committee in the previous year; and by newly revealed Wells Fargo scandals in the intervening year. One of these scandals involved the discovery that up to 570,000 car loan customers of Wells Fargo had been charged inappropriately for failing to maintain qualifying insurance on their cars. ¹⁴ The media spotlight was clearly on Sloan. The ethical status of his CEO-speak on this occasion ought to have been irreproachable.

Importance of CEO-speak and ethical leadership

A leader’s language is an important and potent facet of leadership (Fairhurst, 2007). In business, CEO-speak can enable the CEO to ‘set the tone, to lead, to be reasonable’ (Hanlon and Mandarini, 2015: 413). Conger (1991) made the potency of CEO-speak vivid in his characterization of how ‘the issue of ethics’ is associated with the language of leadership. He offered the following cautions:

Language skills can be misused … leaders may present information or anecdotes that make their visions appear more realistic or more appealing than they actually are. They may also use their language skills to screen out problems or to foster an illusion of control when, in reality, things are quite out of control… (pp. 43–44).

The example here of Wells Fargo’s Timothy Sloan reveals the pertinence of the cautions raised by Conger.

The written and oral utterances of corporate leaders deserve sustained scrutiny. Hart et al.(2013: 3) observe that ‘People [such as CEOs] use words to make impressions on other people [and that] it has always been thus’. But, importantly, the ‘impressions on other people’ are ever more salient if the people uttering the words, orally or in writing, including via social media such as Twitter (Craig and Amernic, 2020) are powerful actors in society – such as political leaders and CEOs of major companies. The words of leaders matter, at times profoundly, because ‘CEO-speak [is] a framer of rhetorical objectives, a fashioner of perceptions, a shaper of knowledge, and an influencer of social cognition and cultural relations’ (Amernic and Craig, 2006: 137).

A close reading of Sloan’s written testimony helps to improve observers’ understanding of him as an individual, how he made sense of the world, how he discharged his role as ‘Chief Truth Officer’ (Bouilloud et al., 2019), and why the Wells Fargo he led was found to have an unsavoury ethical environment. Through close reading we can better understand the important role of a CEO’s language in devising and embedding a desirable culture of ethical conduct (Ashforth et al., 2008).

As a language genre, CEO-speak plays a crucial role in the ongoing construction (or destruction) of an organization’s social reality: that is, of its culture and ethical infrastructure. The role language plays in building social realities (Jian et al., 2008) is far more constitutive than regarding language as merely a

… vehicle for the expression of pre-existing ‘realities’ [and not as] the means by which organizations are established, composed, designed, and sustained. Organizations are (…) ongoing and precarious accomplishments realized, experienced, and identified primarily – if not exclusively – in communication processes (Cooren et al., 2011: 1150).

CEO-speak is also an important means of enabling trust, especially when (as with Wells Fargo) trust is seriously impaired (Bachmann et al., 2015; Kodish, 2017). Although repairing trust requires more than ‘mere words’, nonetheless, the words of a corporate leader are crucial, particularly in a high-profile rhetorical setting. The CEO’s language can be symbolic in ways that will help to repair or impair trust. Thus, CEO-speak has strong potential to affect ethical and unethical behaviours among a CEO’s followers and other corporate stakeholders, and to (partially) reveal the leader’s thinking.

Ethical CEO-speak is a reasonable normative goal for corporate leaders. Consequently, critical evaluation and monitoring of CEO-speak, from an ethical perspective, should be an ongoing task for stakeholders. Here we focus attention on, and develop links between, ethical CEO-speak and ethical leadership. We define ‘ethical leadership’ as involving

…the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions and interpersonal relationships and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication, reinforcement, and decision-making (Brown et al., 2005: 120).

This definition can be understood better by conceptualizing the role of a leader as partly that of a moral manager whose efforts positively and negatively influence the behaviours of others. An ethical or moral manager

… leads others on the ethical dimension, lets them know what is expected, and holds them accountable. Moral managers set ethical standards, communicate ethics messages, role model ethical conduct, and use rewards and punishments to guide ethical behavior in the organization (Treviño and Brown, 2004: 75).

Consistent with the concept of a ‘moral manager’, ‘…people may infer ethical leadership from courageous or compassionate ethical action in crisis situations’ (Treviño, Brown and Hartman, 2003: 29). The appearance of a CEO before a US Senate committee that is investigating the scandalous activities of the company the CEO leads, is akin to a ‘crisis situation’. Part of the rhetorical potency of such an appearance resides in the symbolic nature of the appearance or what has been referred to as ‘executive symbolism’ (Hambrick and Lovelace, 2018). In the case of Sloan’s appearance, the intent of the ‘executive symbolism’ was to advance Wells Fargo’s new strategic theme: that it was a ‘better bank’ on a journey to ‘earn back the public’s trust’ (quotation [b], above).

Focusing attention on the linguistic and symbolic roles of Sloan’s appearance and on the ethicality of his CEO-speak is merited because ‘ethical leadership’ involves ‘…the demonstration of normatively appropriate conduct through personal actions … and the promotion of such conduct to followers through two-way communication [and] reinforcement…’ (Brown et al., 2005).

Balanced framing

The first few words uttered by a speaker or writer offer important clues to the framing of a text. Framing an argument is important since ‘[a]n audience’s interpretation of and reaction to a person, event, or discourse can be shaped by the frame in which that information is viewed’ (Benoit, 2001: 72). Framing makes ‘some aspects of a perceived reality … more salient in a communicating text … [and] promote[s] a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation …’ (Entman, 1993: 52). Frames function in one or more of four locations in the communication process: communicator, text, receiver, and culture, as follows:

Communicators make conscious or unconscious framing judgments in deciding what to say, guided by frames … that organize their belief systems. The text contains frames, which are manifested by the presence or absence of certain keywords, stock phrases, stereotyped images, sources of information, and sentences that provide thematic … reinforce[ment]. The frames that guide the receiver’s thinking and conclusion may or may not reflect the frames in the text and the framing intention of the communicator. The culture is … the empirically demonstrable set of common frames exhibited in the discourse and thinking of most people in a social grouping (Entman, 1993: 52–53, italics applied).

The framing of testimony delivered in a high-profile rhetorical event such as a Senate hearing should not be biased by excluding the possibility of other perspectives. A biased framing is likely to be self-defeating.

Our focus on the framing of Sloan’s opening written testimony ignores other potentially salient aspects of Sloan’s ‘performance’ before the committee. We do not, for example, explore his demeanor and attire, and how he responded to questions. However, focusing on the written text provides at least two benefits in forming a critical assessment. First, it recognizes that Sloan’s written text was not an extemporaneous utterance, but was prepared with intent, and very likely with the assistance of legal and communication advisors. Thus, it is emblematic of an ‘official’ Wells Fargo communication. Second, the written text is an enduring public record of what Sloan intended to say in terms of content and style. This is far different from the back-and-forth exchanges of the question-and-answer part of a public Senate hearing, during which the emotions, fatigue, and grandstanding of the witness (Sloan) and the questioners (the senators) intervene unavoidably.

Principled use of ideology and metaphor

Our critical exploration of ideology is aided by adopting the interrogatory framework suggested by Lye (1997, slightly abridged), in which he highlights important matters of transparency:

Q1: What are the assumptions about what is natural, just and right?

Lye’s interrogatory framework offers a pragmatic way of eliciting elements of a text’s ideology and of revealing the potential for language to hide ideology. Although it is not always easy to do so, CEOs should strive to make the ideology inherent in their text transparent. Lye’s nine questions provide a good pragmatic starting point from which to understand the ideology of a text. For practical reasons we address only four of these questions (Q1, Q5, Q6, Q9).

Weick (1995: 113) has described ideology as ‘a crucial resource for sensemaking’. For Weick (1995: 111) ‘ideologies combine beliefs about cause-effect relations, preferences for certain outcomes, and expectations of appropriate behaviors’. Weick’s definition of ‘ideology’ rightly emphasizes the sensemaking of those who construct an ideological discourse, such as was constructed in Sloan’s written opening testimony. ¹⁵ So, Sloan’s discourse can also be viewed from the perspective of its potential influence as an ‘ideology-creator’ for the various constituencies it affected.

Metaphor contributes to the construction of ideology because it ‘… structures inquiry, establishes relevance, and provides an interpretive system’ (Landau, 1961: 351). Some metaphors ‘transport especially powerful biases, because … they camouflage the social underpinnings of the reality to which they refer [and because] different metaphors have different ideological attachments’ (Tinker, 1986: 365). Other metaphors should be regarded ‘as a shadowy image for communicating only dimly perceived realities’ (Paparone, 2008).

An important aspect of the blossoming interest in metaphor has been a growing alertness to the dangers of unprincipled use of metaphor, especially by those in power (Kalmoe et al., 2017). This new-found alertness is well-merited because the power of metaphor (for example, in constructing ideology) is often nuanced. Among the authors who have drawn attention to the inextricable link between metaphor and ideology are Arcimaviciene and Jonaitiene (2015), Charteris-Black (2009), and Fairclough (1992).

The critical analysis we conduct draws on the four tests of ethicality in metaphor use that were suggested by Duffy (2013):

1. History test: ‘How closely does the metaphor correspond to the facts of the case?’

Many CEOs are moral role models (Sims and Brinkmann, 2002). They should strive to use metaphors in a principled way. Their metaphors, particularly in high-profile rhetorical events, help to set an organization’s ethical ‘tone at the top’ (Amernic et al., 2010). They are not merely ‘linguistic decoration or verbal artistry [but are] indicative of leaders’ thinking and … a basis of their actions’ (Oberlechner and Mayer-Schoenberger, 2002).

Justified rhetoric

We focus on ‘rhetoric’ in its non-pejorative, classical sense (Barilli, 1989; Lanham, 1993) of constituting ‘the study of how people persuade’ (McCloskey, 1985: 29). We do not address its less-than-ethical pejorative meaning of constituting bombast. Thus, we regard rhetoric as the process of seeking to have another person ‘look at things from our point of view’, and to have them share our ‘attention-structure’ (Lanham, 1993: 227).

Word choice is an important aspect of rhetoric. For example, the strategic choice of language euphemisms can help ‘… to approach unsettling, embarrassing, or distasteful … topics without appearing inconsiderate to peoples’ concerns’ (Crespo-Fernández, 2018: 1). Language euphemisms are ‘disguised’ stories we tell about our unethical actions (Tenbrunsel and Messick, 2004: 226). They help turn unacceptable behaviours into socially approved behaviours. Thus, euphemisms can make harmful conduct respectable (Bandura, 1999). For example, ‘“right sizing”—[is] the favored term for layoffs—[because it] focuses attention toward the economic benefits and away from the human costs of putting people out of work’ (Tenbrunsel and Messick, 2004: 227). Closely related to language euphemisms is the practice of ‘ostensibly descriptive naming’ or recognizing that oftentimes ‘…the only way to escape mortification or victimization is to rename the situation … [to] affect orientation, interests, perspectives, and pieties’ (Cheney et al., 1999: 145).

A CEO in a high-profile setting should be aware of, and be able to justify, the major rhetorical aspects of the discourse s/he presents. These include the metaphors used, the structure of the discourse presented, and the embodied logic, assumptions, euphemisms, appeals to authority, appeals to emotion, and omissions. All are part of the ‘art of persuasion’.

Wells Fargo

Wells Fargo is an American international banking and financial services company, founded in 1852 and headquartered in San Francisco. In 2016, Wells Fargo had $1.9 trillion in assets ¹⁶ and provided banking and associated services at 8600 locations, 13,000 ATMs, and offices in 42 countries. The company had approximately 269,000 full-time equivalent staff and served one in three households in the United States. In February 2014, of the top 500 banking brands, Wells Fargo was ranked the world’s most valuable for the second consecutive year. ¹⁷ In 2015, Wells Fargo was ranked the world’s 22nd most admired company and the seventh most respected company. In 2016, Wells Fargo was ranked 27th on FORTUNE’s list of America’s largest corporations and third in assets among all US banks. Despite such accolades, on 2 February 2018, the US Federal Reserve Bank barred Wells Fargo from increasing its asset base until it fixed internal problems and ‘improve[d] governance and controls’. ¹⁸

The scandal that prompted a series of Wells Fargo CEOs to be invited to appear before the US Senate Committee in successive years arose from a violation of trust by Wells Fargo. In 2016, Sanger, the [then] Chairman of Wells Fargo’s Board of Directors, described the violations as ‘opening accounts for certain retail banking customers that they did not request or in some cases even know about’ (Wells Fargo Annual Report, 2016: 3). Sanger continued by asserting that ‘this behavior is unacceptable, not only to the Board but also to the overwhelming majority of our people who are hard-working and highly ethical’. The unacceptable behaviour mentioned was apparently just a small part of Wells Fargo’s troubles that were exposed initially in December 2013. A series of ethically inappropriate behaviours by Wells Fargo was reported subsequently. These continued right through to Sloan’s 3 October 2017 appearance before the Senate Committee. For example, on 31 August 2017, Wells Fargo reported that a third-party review of its retail sales practices had increased estimates of its potentially fake customer accounts from 2.1 million to 3.5 million. ¹⁹

Timothy Sloan

Sloan was a long-serving, highly experienced Wells Fargo employee. He had previously held major leadership positions in the bank, including as chief administration officer (2010–2011), chief financial officer (2011–2014), Head of Wholesale Banking (2014–2015), and chief operating officer (2015–2016). ²⁰ His colleagues describe him as a ‘no-nonsense professional’, a very hard worker, and someone who will ‘go anywhere, do anything’ but who has ‘little time for leisure’ (McLannahan, 2016). Sloan was noted for his political influence, ‘commitment to the community’ and ‘won’t back down’ attitude in the face of political pressure (Berman, 2018).

Thus, Sloan would likely have been very aware of the importance of leadership-through-language and of the political importance of what was at stake when he appeared before the Senate Committee. He knew Wells Fargo and its recent scandal-ridden history well. He had been CEO for almost one full year and, in that time, had engaged in intensive efforts to redeem the company’s reputation. In doing so, he was being consistent with a commitment he made in a Wells Fargo press release (dated 12 October 2016) announcing his appointment as CEO. In this he said that his ‘immediate and highest priority [was] to restore trust in Wells Fargo’. ²¹

Method

In terms of the typology of eight ‘traditions’ of communications research highlighted by Merkl-Davies and Brennan (2019), the present study falls within the ‘rhetorical tradition’. Consistent with this typology, we analyze how ‘corporate narrative can or does persuade audiences to accept organizational actions, policies or performance’ (p. 445).

The hearing of the US Senate Committee began at 10:01 am on 3 October 2017 and adjourned after about 2 hours. We analyze the transcript of approximately 2211 words (reproduced in Appendix 1, with line numbers added) of the part of the hearing in which Sloan’s read his opening written statement. ²² This is part of a 181-page document posted to the US government website. ²³ This larger document also contains responses to oral and written questions of the Committee, and other supporting material. We do not explore the oral evidence or the verbal exchanges between Sloan and individual senators. Particular passages were chosen for analysis because they were emblematic of CEO Sloan’s messaging. They were crucial elements of the narrative that he was constructing regarding the (alleged) redemption of Wells Fargo.

We examined Sloan’s opening statement using the close reading approach described by Amernic and Craig (2006: 6). This process involves slowing down the reading of text, re-reading sentences and paragraphs, exploring the sequence and frequency with which ideas and words are used, and reflecting on how various facts, text or arguments are co-related. We searched for implicit assumptions, ideology, silences, techniques of argumentation, metaphor, apt and inapt juxtapositions, and insights to authorial intent. Further, we applied, where relevant, several of the other strategies of textual analysis described by Martin (1990). These include ‘dismantling dichotomies [to] expose them as false distinctions’; filling voids by ‘attending to disruptions and contradictions [in] places where the text fails to make sense’; and deciphering taboos by ‘focusing on the element that is most alien to a text or context’. Each author separately read the target text several times until a consensus view was reached.

A limitation of close reading is that although it produces many useful insights, it can also lead to contestable conclusions because there is often a ‘plurality of plausible explanations’ for the matters being considered (Ron, 2008: 291). Another limitation arises from equating an ethical view with telling the truth or being accurate in representing reality. We concede that what is ‘true’ and ‘not true’ is not a clear-cut issue, and that in professing to differentiate ‘truth’ from ‘not truth’, we may be claiming privileged access to knowledge of ‘the real’ situation. However, the seven quotes at the beginning of this paper are supportive because they provide strong signals of ongoing dysfunctional behaviour at the company.

Two contextual factors guide our evaluation of CEO Sloan’s written statement. First, is that even as he delivered his comments to the Senate committee, Wells Fargo continued its dysfunctional behaviour in various ways, as evidenced by the quotes at the beginning of this paper. Second, that CEO Sloan himself, as shown by his biographical description, was a long-time Wells Fargo insider and senior leader.

Framing

Sloan’s opening paragraphs frame Wells Fargo in a way that is intended to show the company has made ‘progress’ and that it is better under his leadership. The opening text (lines 10 to 12, see Appendix 1) emphasizes that Sloan appears before the committee without the compulsion of a subpoena. The pronoun ‘I’ signals that Sloan, the CEO, is the accountable person. He uses words with positive connotations (‘appreciate’, ‘discuss’ and ‘opportunity’) to frame his appearance in a positive, voluntary and (almost) eager light. The verb ‘discuss’ envisages an interchange of (presumed) equals: that is, between Sloan and the Senate Committee. The implication is that both parties are interested in a common dialogue. The word ‘progress’ connotes movement in a desirable direction, an improvement.

Sloan frames the agency and responsibility for the matters under consideration as residing with the entity, Wells Fargo, and not with specific human beings. He asserts that ‘Wells Fargo’ ‘has made’ this ‘progress’. This ascription of agency to an amorphous entity de-emphasizes the roles and accountability of human beings and plays down their potential culpability. However, because a company is inanimate, it cannot experience ‘great disappointment’ (line 14), only actual people can. Thus, references to the entity, Wells Fargo, mask the culpability of humans for the scandals that were prompted by actual humans.

The opening four paragraphs frame Wells Fargo and Sloan in favourable light. Sloan acknowledges the ‘problems’ committed because ‘our Community bank’ did not recognize the ‘full scope and seriousness regarding the problems’ (lines 14–19). He admits deficiencies in the company’s state of knowledge and actions. This key framing paragraph also asserts that ‘all of you were right to criticize us’. Crucially, he declares that this criticism was heard and (apparently) is being acted upon. This paragraph of admission and implicit shame acknowledges that insight and action on the part of Wells Fargo is required to achieve redemption in the eyes of the company’s stakeholders, including regulators.

The apparent intent of the introductory framing is to impress the audience with Sloan’s ‘noble’ commitment as CEO to ethical conduct and with his capacity to enter moral judgements. Through his language, Sloan purports to know what is right and wrong (‘you [the Committee] were right to criticize us’: line 18); what is good and bad (‘Wells Fargo is a better bank today’: line 26); and what is acceptable and not acceptable (‘That was unacceptable’: line 24). There is a hint of hubris in his claim that the bank is ‘better [under his leadership] today than it was a year ago’ and that next year it ‘will be a better bank than it is today’ (lines 26–27).

In the written testimony, it is revealing to compare the behaviours attributed to Sloan personally with those of Wells Fargo collectively. Sloan takes the high moral ground by accepting the company’s responsibility to recognize past mistakes and correct them. He seems keen to legitimize his endeavours to craft an ‘ethical culture’ and to portray himself as part of the ‘solution’, not part of the ‘problem’. However, any attempt by Sloan to distance himself, even implicitly, from implication in the mistakes, dysfunctions, and failed responses of the past, ignores that he was at various times (and to varying degrees) part of the senior management team collectively responsible for those ‘mistakes’. ²⁴

Nonetheless, by the personal pronoun ‘I’, Sloan is the one who ‘heard [the committee] … customers … and team members’ (lines 18–19). He is the one who is ‘deeply sorry’ (line 21) and who ‘apologize[s] for the damage done’. In contrast, the Wells Fargo ‘failures’ that led to Sloan’s appointment as CEO are attributed collectively. Thus, ‘we’ failed because ‘we recognized [the seriousness] too late’ (lines 14–15); ‘we had not fully grappled with the damage’ (lines 16–17); and ‘we came … without a good plan’ (line 18). His statement that ‘the bank’s leaders [we] acted too slowly’ (lines 23–34) seems rather hollow – he ought to have clearly admitted, ‘including myself’.

Ideology and metaphor

Sloan refers to ‘customers and team members’ three times (in lines 17–21) and to the ‘public’s trust’ (line 28). Curiously, he does not mention shareholders. This privileging has ideological overtones. Possibly, it reflects the embarrassment Sloan thought he would suffer if he was perceived to be prioritizing the interests of shareholders over those of other stakeholders. He needed to be wary of arousing public concerns that shareholders benefited from additional profits generated from the bank’s scandalous behaviour. Such exclusion is at odds with Sloan’s prior statements about the scandal in which he mentioned shareholders and investors. ²⁵

Flowing from Lye’s (1997) Question 5 (What people, classes, areas of life, experiences, are ‘left out’, silenced?), the omission of ‘shareholders’ is surprising since one would expect that being a privileged class within the corporate context, they would naturally be mentioned by the CEO during his Senate committee appearance. This striking omission encourages speculation that it was a rhetorical move intended to shield the ownership class.

Sloan is silent on the extent to which directors and senior managers (including himself) benefited from enhanced remuneration as a result of the bank’s unethical practices. Sloan distances himself from his management colleagues despite repeating the keyword ‘team members’ 20 times. He portrays his colleagues as being late in recognizing issues, having no plan to solve problems, and as responding slowly once issues were recognized. Thereby, Sloan devalues his colleagues and ‘silences’ them. In a sense, Sloan portrays them ‘as scapegoats from which the organization must distance itself’ (Anderson and Guo, 2020: 213). As Sloan’s soon-to-be-made resignation attests, he seems to have been ensnared himself by such scapegoating.

A striking aspect of Sloan’s framing paragraphs is the underlying metaphor of the ‘penitent learner, able and willing to learn’ (Tourish and Hargie, 2012). Through this metaphor of redemption, Sloan portrays those who have failed Wells Fargo as now determined to redeem themselves by earning back trust. The penance implied in this ‘awakening’ seems intended to appeal broadly to any of the Senate committee members who were keen to project their endorsement of core American religious values to constituents. Thus, the metaphor seems highly likely to pass the ‘resonance test’ (Duffy, 2013). Ideologically too, there is an ethically positive ‘vision of human possibility’ (Lye, 1997, Q9) that would most likely appeal to the senators.

The ‘grappling’ metaphor (line 16) is likely to have a positive ethical impact because it conveys the difficulties Wells Fargo experienced in coping with the situation it confronted. Nonetheless, ‘grappled’ is a distracting euphemism because it diverts attention from the company’s apparent obliviousness, over several years, to the odious practices it adopted. The metaphor is also confounding: the uncertainty and clumsiness it implies is at odds with the cool cocksureness that Sloan presents in his bold assertion that ‘we will get it right’ (line 155).

The iconic Wells Fargo stagecoach metaphor courses through Sloan’s submission. This metaphor is embedded in larger discourses of capitalism and trust and is deployed as a part of a larger persistent metaphor of Wells Fargo being on a ‘journey’ to restore trust. ²⁶ Wells Fargo proclaims that its stagecoach is an ‘enduring symbol … of the company’s heritage of service, stability, and innovation’. ²⁷ Such symbolism draws upon linguistic and visual discourses of the American West that are embedded in American culture.

For many years, the cover of Wells Fargo’s annual report displayed images of a stagecoach. This metaphor ‘symboliz[es] a bank that comes through for its customers’ (Biel, 1993: 73). The imagery is so potent that the company deployed this metaphor in TV advertisements in 2018 to help repair its damaged reputation (Peltz, 2018). The metaphor’s overriding entailments are the ‘Old West’ traditions of dependability and commitment (Wells, 1993). Through the use of this ‘identity anchor’ (Anderson and Guo, 2020), Sloan imagines Wells Fargo to be a bank that will deliver for its customers (just like a Wells Fargo stagecoach seemingly did in the Old West). The metaphor WELLS FARGO IS A STAGECOACH envisages a journey through an often hostile and difficult territory. The implication is that the community can have confidence that Wells Fargo knows the best route through hostile territory and will deliver customers to their planned destinations safely. Use of the stagecoach metaphor can be construed as a way of fostering resilience through promoting an historical organizational image as being ‘central, enduring and distinctive’ (Albert and Whetten, 1985).

Thus, Sloan exploits a metaphor that has been long-associated with the company. His intent seems to be to display Wells Fargo’s contrition to stakeholders, to legitimize its promise to do better in the future, to reinforce a commitment to ‘restore our reputation and our customers’ trust’, and to ‘make Wells Fargo the finest and most ethical company it can be’ (lines 188–189). The idea that the company is on a path to ‘restor[ing] [its] reputation’ is a personal pledge by Sloan.

Sloan’s metaphors are largely, but not entirely, principled and ethical. They satisfy Duffy’s (2013) ‘resonance test’ and ‘history test’ but seem to fail the ‘proportionality test’ and ‘quiet room’ test. Perhaps those hearing, reading, and watching Sloan’s opening testimony are being manipulated just a bit?

Rhetoric

Is Sloan’s rhetoric justified? Some of Sloan’s euphemisms are inaccurate and ‘less than ethical’. Sloan’s CEO-speak would have been more ethical in the absence of some of his euphemisms or inappropriate ‘ostensibly descriptive naming’. For example, the past year is described euphemistically as ‘a year of great disappointment and transition’ (line 14) rather than a highly unsettled one, or one of turmoil. The patriotic euphemism describing Wells Fargo as ‘this important American institution’ (lines 22–23) seems intended to promote a sense of community and to be a veiled warning to the Senate Committee to ‘tread carefully’ because of the bank’s considerable power and influence.

Sloan’s rhetoric reinforces the ‘cultural assumption’ (Lye 1997, Q6) he promoted on 4 August 2017 when he referred to Wells Fargo as ‘this treasured 165-year-old institution’. ²⁸ Through this wording, Sloan seems to be seeking to enrol the emotional allegiance of the senators in venerating Wells Fargo. Such allegiance to the iconic brand signalled by the words Wells Fargo would be stimulated by the emotions that were likely to be stirred up in individual senators. The beneath-the-surface awareness of each senator was being sensitized to the conflux of ideas, many of them symbolic, that are embedded when the iconic image of ‘Wells Fargo’ was invoked by Sloan’s words.

Commendably, Sloan describes the problems confronting Wells Fargo, free of euphemism, as ‘the sales practices scandal’ (lines 16–17). The word ‘scandal’ acknowledges, through honest and accurate naming, the seriousness of the misdeeds in which Wells Fargo was involved. By naming some of the company’s ‘sales practices’ as a ‘scandal’, Sloan uses the naming power of his language accurately and ethically.

This naming power has important implications insofar as rhetoric is concerned. The seemingly straightforward act of ‘naming’ may be rhetorically significant, as Cheney et al. (1999: 145) observe as part of their assessment of the work of Kenneth Burke:

The power of words is further demonstrated in the magic of ostensibly descriptive naming …Burke notes the great potency of “accurate” naming: our drive to find the best label for something. How objects, feelings and events are named affects orientation, interests, perspectives, and pieties. Whether we … call a foreign movement “freedom fighters” or “rebels” has profound implication for policy formation with respect to that other group in another country; each term, with its historical and ideological baggage, is highly suggestive of a policy.

Sloan’s two uses of the word ‘mistakes’ are euphemisms. Calling something a ‘mistake’ is another example of the power of naming. Sloan says ‘… we will compensate every customer who suffered because Wells Fargo made mistakes’ (lines 42–43). The word ‘mistakes’ clouds the location of agency. The ‘practices’ Sloan refers to were caused by human beings (including the senior executive team) and the management control systems those executives designed and implemented. Thus, naming Wells Fargo as the agent of these ‘mistakes’ ignores the agency of the specific people involved. ‘Mistakes’ is deployed in its ‘softer’ sense of ‘misunderstanding’ and not that of ‘blunder’.

Sloan’s eight uses of the word ‘problem(s)’ are more troubling. From an ethical perspective, this usage softens the severity of scandalous actions by some Wells Fargo staff. Sloan ignores the agency of the Wells Fargo leaders who condoned such actions, implicitly or explicitly, and oversaw the dysfunctional management control systems involved.

Sloan describes fundamental changes in the Wells Fargo management control system that prompted the company to move from a relatively decentralized structure to a more centralized one (lines 99–108). However, his description is misleading since this very large company had been led centrally to a significant degree hitherto. Sloan alleges that the prior version of the company’s management control system was too decentralized and caused severe dysfunction. He should have acknowledged that formal decentralization in key areas, such as sales practices, was subject to management override.

We focus now on the structure of the text after line 25. Sloan asserts that ‘my team and I have been focused on the three tasks that you have invited me to discuss today’ (lines 28–29). The remainder of his written testimony is structured to report on the company’s actions in addressing these ‘three tasks’. The first of them is to establish ‘a fundamentally different organization’ (lines 31–34; 45–81). The second is to look ‘beyond the Community Bank to review operations across the entire company’ (lines 36–39; 83–150). The third is to ‘make things right for every customer’ affected ‘by any of our practices’ (lines 41–43; 152–177).

This three-part structure and the headings chosen for each part (‘Transforming Our Community Bank’; ‘Accountability’; and ‘Making Things Right with Our Customers’) are rhetorically potent. ‘Transforming Our Community Bank’ evokes the important organizational and leadership construct of ‘transforming/transformation’. Thus, Sloan signals he is a transformational leader – a characterization that allegedly ‘inspires, intellectually stimulates, and is individually considerate of followers’ (Bass, 1999: 9).

‘Accountability’ is an important but ambiguous keyword whose meaning ranges from ‘… a condition where one party is answerable to another for some action to an expansive, ambiguous, and often enigmatic term with considerable cultural gravitas cutting across many cultural domains…’ (Dubnick, 2014). This ambiguity has the potential to impair ethical clarity. Sloan’s written testimony describes the specific mechanisms of accountability the company has implemented (lines 85–123). Thus, it employs the keyword ‘accountability’ in a relatively precise manner. Lines 85–97 report details of the specific sanctions meted out to various (but not always named) executives following public revelation of the bank’s behaviour. Details such as this are worthy and constitute ethical CEO-speak. However, the rationales gloss over the precise compensation sanctions and dismissals. Thus, this part of the ‘Accountability’ text suffers the deficiency of omission.

The third section, ‘Making Things Right with Our Customers’ begins: ‘The entire Wells Fargo team, all 270,000 of us, is committed to making things right for customers the bank let down. This is a big job, and we will get it right’ (lines 154–155). These cliché-ridden sentences obscure underlying assumptions about the nature of the human world of organizations and the fallible people therein. The bravado of ‘we will get it right’ invokes an implicit natural assumption of senior management infallibility. Assumptions such as this deserve examination, consistent with Lye’s (1997) question 1 (‘What are the assumptions about what is natural, just and right?’). Cheney (1998: 29) points out that such assumptions, or what he labels ‘key organizing terms’, should be examined for their ‘powerful ambiguities, ironies, and twists and turns [because they are] slogans that simultaneously command emotional allegiance and are devoid of precise meaning’.

The assertion that ‘The entire Wells Fargo team, all 270,000 of us, is committed to making things right for customers the bank let down’ uses ‘team’ as a powerful metaphor for the ‘company’ as a whole. This clichéd metaphor is enhanced rhetorically when used as part of the larger term ‘Wells Fargo team’ to evoke the stagecoach/American frontier image. Sloan also asserts that the ‘entire Wells Fargo team’, literally every human working for the company (‘all 270,000 of us’), are thus ‘committed’. Thereby, he exaggerates the reality of a large organization’s social and human complexity. He makes superficial assumptions about leadership and followership (for example, that everyone in a large organization is committed to a specific goal). Thus, in terms of Lye’s (1997, Q6) interrogatory framework, this displays a ‘myth [that] shape[s] experience and evaluation’. When viewed metaphorically, Sloan’s use of the Wells Fargo ‘team’ metaphor evokes Hamington’s (2009: 473) caution that words and concepts used in sports and games ‘have the potential to be ethically problematic’.

What is implied by the word ‘committed’ is unclear too. This word is used as a slogan to subtly enlist the emotional allegiance of the Senate committee to the three ‘tasks’ Wells Fargo has set itself. Similarly, the goal of ‘making things right for customers the bank let down’ is a slogan ‘that simultaneously command[s] emotional allegiance [but is] devoid of precise meaning’ (Cheney, 1998: 29). The euphemism ‘customers the bank let down’ is a very mild acknowledgement that ‘the bank’ (not its leadership and its dysfunctional management control systems, but some abstraction) committed fraudulent acts that adversely affected the lives of numerous customers and employees.