“Moaning is not a management task,” Rupert Stadler, chief executive of the German carmaker Audi, told this newspaper this month. “We can all join in the moaning, or we can make a virtue out of the plight. I am rather doing the latter.”

Mr Stadler is choosing to accentuate the positive. After all, who wants to be led by a pessimist? Jeffrey Immelt, chief executive of General Electric, keeps his darker thoughts to himself while maintaining a public breeziness. As he told the Harvard Business School centennial conference last October: “You can’t sit there in front of over 300,000 people and say: ‘I don’t know what to do!’ You have to say: ‘We’re gonna nail this one, and here’s why!’”