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The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether there are information leaks immediately before CEOs change and – if so – whether some investors take financial advantage of such prior knowledge. It thirdly investigates the ethical, practical and professional options for communication managers to deal with such situations.

Working from sentiment theory of financial markets, the authors studied Internet search patterns for incoming CEO names and stock market movements immediately prior to the public mention or speculation of CEO change.

The authors find that in nearly a quarter of CEO changes at Fortune 500 companies, the name of the future CEO seems to have been leaked. Additionally, nearly half of those companies also experience extreme, otherwise unexplainable movements in the stock market.

This paper discovers the prevalence of extreme stock market movements for a company when the name of that company's next CEO has likely been leaked. Such leaks are an opportunity for unscrupulous investors, but they create ethical dilemmas for organizations. Communication managers typically respond by organizing tighter governance. However, to keep up with the speed of information and investments traveling through algorithms, organizing radical transparency could become an alternative instead.

The purpose of this paper is to find out whether, which and how international corporations use their codes of conduct to guide employees double‐bound by contradicting cultural norms.

The paper draws on integrative social contracts theory to content‐analyse the codes of conduct of the “Fortune Global 500” and the “UNCTAD 100”.

The vast majority of international corporations' codes either does not acknowledge contradictions between equally binding norms, or lacks priority rules for employees to resolve them. Nonetheless, several codes of conduct describe how norms might contradict, give clear priority to one set of norms (local or corporate) and provide specific examples to employees of when and how to apply a priority rule.

The paper identifies the 33 codes of conduct which can serve as best practices for international corporations' employee and corporate communication.

Contradictions between cultural norms are unacknowledged or unresolved in communication practice and little explored in corporate communication research. This paper assesses the scope of this caveat in communication practice and offers solutions in the form of an existing normative theory and of newly identified best practices.