1.	Every year, 100 annuals from around the world do well. True or false? Answer: False. Make that half-a-hundred. Forty-nine to date among the 1996 crop of reports. Year after year, that's how many score at least 100 of a possible 135 points, judged against Sid Cato's copyrighted set of criteria.
	2.	Good as their annuals may be, no producer is a corporate officer. True or false? Answer: False. Latest annual report producer to achieve officer-level status is Hercules' Amy Binder. To name a few, there's also Norwest's Larry Haeg, ConAgra's Lynn Phares, ServiceMaster's Claire Buchan, Cemex' Luis F. Garibay. And producer of the Mosinee Paper report (Don Janis), which achieved No. 1 ranking three times, was an officer. So is Apogee's William G. Gardner, treasurer/chief financial officer and corporate secretary. Also, Karen Himle, communications VP of St. Paul Cos.
	3.	When someone dies—say, a company founder or chairman or some such—seldom is a big deal made of it in the annual report. True or false? Answer: False—certainly in the case of a company headquartered in The Netherlands. Aegon Insurance Group did its tribute superbly in memory of "our friend and colleague David A. Berridge"—so well, the tribute warranted praise for its unusually sensitive writing. "Too often, such tributes are woeful, sound as if writers worked from a template, filling in the blanks as necessary" to quote a phrase from Sid Cato's September issue of his Newsletter on Annual Reports.
	4.	For most corporations, building shareholder value is where it's at. True or false? Answer: True—though Sid Cato is convinced companies with that approach need to re-examine their priorities. He believes the No. 1 goal of a publicly held company is to provide a fine service, or make a superb product, the task performed by loyal, hardworking men and women who, thus gainfully, proudly employed, thereby lend stability to the family unit as well as to cities, regions, nations..."indeed, the world."
	5.	But almost no one subscribes to these priorities. True or false? Answer: It depends on your definition of "almost no one." In his September newsletter, he singles out the few whose philosophies coincide with his: ServiceMaster, Medtronic, Goodyear, First Data, Mexico's Cemex, Phillips Petroleum and, now, Eastman Kodak.
	6.	Sid's newsletter—starting Year No. 15. It's just for U.S. audiences. True or false? Answer: He has subscribers around the world...from Taiwan to Malaysia, Belgium to Japan, the U.K. to Australia, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Israel, Mexico, even Czechoslovakia.