 |  Periodic editorials concerning everything from the very worst industry—from an annual report standpoint, that is—to what's wrong with the Fourth Estate. Reporters who can't hit an accuracy with a cannon. |
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| Periodic editorials concerning everything from the very worst industry—from an annual report standpoint, that is—to what's wrong with the Fourth Estate. Reporters who can't hit an accuracy with a cannon. |
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It’s enough to get a guy down.
Twenty years—two decades—at this stand, and the quality of annuals hasn’t moved all that far off the dime. Two decades and, yet, only a handful of annual reports shine, show ingenuity, truly innovate, break new ground. Sing. This year’s 10 best—many of them in prior years wouldn’t have come close to scaling the heights. Would, in other words, have been also-rans. I know... I know: Managements are increasingly nervous about (1) government regulations, (2) their huge workload and (3) how they can justify the expenditure, which averages $1.6 million, not including staff time. Besides, everyone’s scared out of his or her wits by the Securities and Exchange Commission and/or that guy in New York City who’s handed, by venal corporate executives, a golden opportunity to make an even-bigger name for himself. Our government—in the United States, that is—muddied the waters with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. (SOx, as it’s referred to in shorthand.) SOx gave the slippery ones an out: a chance to denigrate the annual report by pretending it really should include the legalistic 10-K. I maintain the SEC never intended the 10-K to be included in the annual report. And I’m sure (well, maybe...) the SEC never envisioned that companies would take advantage of an otherwise-admirable law to shortchange stockholders. The games corporations play. What scares a guy most is the knowledge that, as the current high-caliber annual report producers retire, or move into something less harrowing than producing this important document, on deadline, with meddlers galore—the new wave won’t know the annual report as the key corporate communiqué, its heritage. They won’t view the annual as a marvelous opportunity to tell a company’s story fully, with panache, élan. Would I enter this business were I to have it all to do over again? Yeah, because I truly love and admire the annual report to shareholders, and have the greatest of admiration for a declining body of professional communicators. Let’s hope the pendulum, inevitably, will swing back. Maybe my worst fears will have been for naught. Maybe annuals will re-emerge as the full-bodied, lovable document they used to be. The key communiqué of corporations worldwide. At least in my mind. Maybe I had stars in my eyes. |
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