They found several clues of takers lekking at the top. One signal appeared in CEO interviews. Since takers tend to be self-absorbed, they’re more likely to use first-person singular pronouns like I, me, mine, my, and myself—versus first-person plural pronouns like we, us, our, ours, and ourselves. In the computer industry, when talking about the company, on average, 21 percent of CEOs’ first-person pronouns were in the singular. For the extreme takers, 39 percent of their first-person pronouns were in the singular. Of every ten words that the taker CEOs uttered referencing themselves, four
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