The survey itself is not intended by Deloitte to be a business outlook report, like others in the field, says Greg Dickinson. In presenting the CFO Signals information, "the pitch we make to CFOs is, What if you had a way to check what's on the radar screen of other CFOs like you?" Hence, the narrowed profile of the respondents. Not only are the companies involved large, multinational and North American, but eight of 10 of them are publicly traded.

"We tend to see the big companies as struggling with things first," Dickinson adds. "If smaller companies are out of the woods, that would come to the top rather quickly." As to why revenue and earnings projects have been stepped down slightly in recent quarters, he says that Deloitte's discussions suggest while "optimism is a human perception measure," the forecasting of sales and earnings require tougher standards from finance executives. "We've been through a rough period of time, with a lot of volatility," he says, and the overall sense is "that things have adjusted pretty well."

While certainly willing to do its share of interpreting the results, Deloitte also works to let the numbers speak for themselves. "We try to go pretty light in explaining it," he says. "Mostly, CFOs want to know what their peers think," and the numbers speak clearly to that.

In all, 77 CFOs or other finance executives participated in the latest survey, emailed to them, and turned back to Deloitte over two weeks in late February. "So all these results came in before Japan, and Egypt [and the expanding Mideast protests] was just sort of escalating," Dickinson notes.