"The battle intensifies." Corporate secretaries and general counsels, my experience indicates, are the leading proponents of a down-and-dirty annual report to shareholders—as contrasted with a full-bodied, informative, forward-looking book. Corporate secretaries and lawyers and, not to forget, chief financial officers. Those three groups have one thing in common: They're not externally oriented. They're decidedly in-bred. Dealing with "outsiders"—from stockholders to the news media—is best left to the externally oriented professional communicator. Meantime, CFOs and their ilk cause turmoil in the corporate suite. Case in point: A corporate officer confides he's "fighting an increasingly intense internal battle over whether the company I'm an officer of should move to the 10-K format." Meaning, that the legalistic Form 10-K—intended only for filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission—would become the essence of the annual report to shareholders. So confused are things, so muddied are the corporate waters, an SEC staff attorney, speaking to graphic designers in New York City, held aloft the one-color, transparent-paper 10-K as what she thought the designers' purview was. So keep in mind—a 10-K is a 10-K is...not a document created for external reading, for savoring by individual shareholders. Back to the perturbed corporate officer: He said his CEO "isn't oblivious to the siren call that the 10-K wrap would lower production costs and create the perception that the corporation is eschewing 'puffery' by eliminating photography and self-serving promotion." Said VP confessed "I'm holding out as long as I can, but the battle is intensifying." He's not alone: A producer of one of the world's best reports, year after year, said "I'm dealing with the same concern for our 2003 book. Our CFO has asked that we look seriously at a 10-K wrap*. "While I'm not a proponent of the wrap, my gut tells me that's where we're headed." She said Duke Energy "actually produced a nice one this year—a fairly meaty editorial section followed by the legalistic 10-K." Perhaps the industry's most consistent producer of exquisite, full-bodied reports said "I'd argue that today it's more important than ever to help shareowners understand what they own, who the management is and what kind of job it's doing...and to do so takes all the work that goes into a complete annual report." Said sage producer: "In these days of lowered trust in management and companies, it's particularly important to maximize the degree to which we engage the reader and help him or her understand the business strategy, how it's being implemented and what the future holds." Summing up: "A full annual report does the job better" of getting "readers to learn more about your company and its leadership and reasons why they should buy or hold the stock. A full annual report also best fits the needs of the one-third of the audience that consists of skimmers (who focus on headlines, captions, photos and graphs)." He noted something obvious to those of us whose background includes the news media—being reporters, for instance: "Most journalists use the annual report as well to gather information on companies they cover." * That term indicates to me that the 10-K would be the prominent part of the annual report, which I don't believe is what's envisioned. I think the wrap would be the regular, traditional, colorful document with the 10-K inserted, though perhaps as main body of the document.

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