ABSTRACT
In his autobiographical account of his rise to the top of corporate America, Jack Welch revealed that one of his favorite expressions during business discussions was, “Don’t Walter Cronkite me!” (Welch, 2001, p. 43). Fortunately, Welch immediately provided an interpretation of his somewhat idiosyncratic meaning: “That [the utterance] was understood by everyone to mean: ‘You report the bad news, but you don’t tell me how you’re going to fix it.’” It was not, presumably, Walter Cronkite’s responsibility as a newscaster to do more than report the news. Thus, the special meaning Welch wished his underlings to take from the verb phrase “to Walter Cronkite” needed to have been acquired through interactions with Welch himself.
