Executive Summaries
The purpose of an executive summary is to consolidate the principal points of a report in one place. It must cover the information in the report in enough detail to reflect accurately its contents but concisely enough to permit an executive to digest the significance of the report without having to read it in full. They are called executive summaries because the intended audience is the busy executive who may have to make funding, personnel, or policy decisions based on findings or recommendations reported for a project.
The executive summary is a comprehensive restatement of the document's purpose, scope, methods, results, conclusions, findings, and recommendations. The executive summary condenses the entire work or explains how the results were obtained or why the recommendations were made. It simply states the results and recommendations, providing only enough information for a reader to decide whether to read the entire work.
Because they are comprehensive, executive summaries tend to be proportional in length to the larger work they summarize. The typical summary is 10 percent of the length of the report.
The sample executive summary below is from a market analyst's report for the executive staff of a corporation. The executive summary is usually organized according to the sequence of chapters or sections of the report it summarizes. It should be written so that it can be read independently of the report. It must not refer by number to figures, tables, or references contained elsewhere in the report. Executive summaries do occasionally contain a figure, table, or footnote, a practice appropriate as long as the information is integral to the summary. Because executive summaries are frequently read in place of the full report, all uncommon symbols, abbreviations, and acronyms must be spelled out.
| Background and purpose |
Executive Summary Many recent business reports and academic papers have suggested that businesses like ours must alter our marketing approaches to benefit society as well as business. They advocate that our marketing decisions should consider not only the profitability of new products but also the value of those products to society. As in most companies, Blyco Corporation has seldom given much consideration to the societal value of new products. In practice, our overriding concern has always been profitability and the competitive position of our firm in the marketplace. |
| Findings | This report says that this attitude will change,
but slowly and only with strong pressures from both consumers and lawmakers, and concludes
that the change will occur because our nation will eventually have to make more efficient
use of our resources. Today we may still be able to ask only "Will it
sell?" Tomorrow we will be forced to ask also "Do we need it?"
Producers of frivolous products will disappear because their markets will evaporate. Producers of marginally useful goods will face shrinking markets. The firms that survive will do so only by making major shifts in both direction and emphasis. |
| Scope | For business to make this change, however, government must put profit in the area of social responsibility. Only by so doing can government assure the maximum response from the business community. If government does not take this necessary step, it will have to resort to laws and regulations to force businesses to make the needed adjustments. |
| Recommendations | Blyco can take a lead in meeting this challenge
by working with government to ensure that we become partners rather than
adversaries. We can take the following specific steps to establish this
relationship:
Taking these steps will not mean that we must abandon our traditional concern for profitability; rather it will help us gain new respect from consumers and will place us in a better position as legislative bodies scrutinize the marketing practices of large corporations in the years to come. |
Source: The Business Writer's Handbook, Brusaw et al., 4th Ed., 1993, pp. 237-8.