Executive summary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

An executive summary, or management summary, is a short document or section of a document,
produced for business purposes, that summarizes a longer report or proposal or a group of related
reports in such a way that readers can rapidly become acquainted with a large body of material
without having to read it all. It usually contains a brief statement of the problem or proposal covered in
the major document(s), background information, concise analysis and main conclusions. It is intended
as an aid to decision-making by managers and has been described as the most important part of
a business plan.[1][2][3][4]
An executive summary differs from an abstract in that an abstract will usually be shorter and is
typically intended as an overview or orientation rather than being a condensed version of the full
document. Abstracts are extensively used in academic research where the concept of the executive
summary is not in common usage. "An abstract is a brief summarizing statement... read by parties
who are trying to decide whether or not to read the main document", while "an executive summary,
unlike an abstract, is a document in miniature that may be read in place of the longer
document".[5]

Structure
There is general agreement on the structure of an executive summary - books and training courses
emphasise similar points.[6][7][8][9][10] Typically, an executive summary will:

 be approximately 5-10% of the length of the main report [8][10]

 be written in language appropriate for the target audience [7][10]
 consist of short, concise paragraphs[7][10]
 begin with a summary[7][10]
 be written in the same order as the main report[6][8]
 only include material present in the main report [6][8]
 make recommendations[7][10]
 provide a justification[7][10]
 have a conclusion[7][8][10]
 be readable separately from the main report[6][7][8]
 sometimes summarize more than one document[7]

Importance
Executive summaries are important as a communication tool in both academia and business. For
example, Texas A&M University states that "An executive summary is an initial interaction between
the writers of the report and their target readers: decision makers, potential customers, and/or peers.
A business leader’s decision to continue reading a certain report often depends on the impression the
executive summary gives."[11]

Criticisms
It has been said that, by providing an easy digest of an often complex matter, an executive summary
can lead policy makers and others to overlook important issues. [12] Prof. Amanda Sinclair of
the University of Melbourne has argued that this is often an active rather than a passive process. In
one study, centred on globalization, she found that policy makers face "pressures to adopt a simple
reading of complex issues" and "to depoliticise and universalize all sorts of differences". She claims
that "all research was framed under pre-defined and generic headings, such as business case points.
The partners' reports were supposed to look the same. The standardization of research occurred via
vehicles such as executive summaries: “executives only read the summaries” we were told”.
[13]
 Similarly Colin Leys, writing in The Socialist Register, argues that executive summaries are used to
present dumbed down arguments: "there is remarkably little adverse comment on the steep decline
that has occurred since 1980 in the quality of government policy documents, whose level of
argumentation and use of evidence is all too often inversely related to the quality of their presentation
(in the style of corporate reports, complete with executive summaries and flashy graphics)." [14]
Corporate Crisis Management Plan Executive Summary
http://strategiccrisisadvisors.com/white-papers/corporate-crisis-management-plan-executive-summary/ (modified)

A corporate Crisis Management Plan is a strategic document to be used by the company’s most senior leadership. It
provides detailed strategic response guidance for executives to use when managing a catastrophic incident. The plan
establishes a structure and a process for integrating executive, managerial and operational resources. Finally, it
provides a framework to facilitate efficient and timely collaboration between:
 Executive leaders.
 Staff department leaders and their teams.
 Business leaders and their organizations.
 Subject matter experts.
 Regional, subsidiary and facilities management and their teams.
The plan defines and integrates all company resources and supporting plans needed for effective crisis response:
 Emergency Response
 People Support
 Business Continuity
 Crisis Communications
 IT Disaster Recovery
 Any other company-specific response plans
The plan mandates a crisis management Crisis Management Process Guardian, who will oversee crisis management
planning, verify the response processes defined in the plans, and audit the effectiveness of the entire response
organization.
The plan is specifically intended to:
 Protect the company’s core assets: People, Property, Knowledge, Image and Market Share.
 Comply with applicable regulations and guidelines such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the National Fire
Protection Associations’ Standard 1600, and meet or exceed generally accepted standards for reasonable
care and preparedness.
 Create an organization and supporting tools, equipment and process to effectively respond to any type of
catastrophic incident, including:
o Facility disasters
o Information technology failures
o Product/service quality or performance failures
o Attacks on reputation, brand or image
o Alleged or real governance failures
o Competitor’s actions
o Violent acts
o Public health disasters
o Natural disasters
The plan is divided into three parts.
 First part: response guide designed to:
o Provide detailed action lists customized for each executive to use during a crisis.
o Define command & control protocols to organize all required employees in crisis response.
o Define a process to prioritize response actions and create action plans for priority actions.
 Second part: program description designed to:
o Provide defensible documentation of the program for external audiences, e.g., insurers, investors,
regulators and juries.
o Gain agreement on how the company intends to prepare, monitor and respond to a catastrophic
incident.
o Provide a benchmark to evaluate performance during an exercise or actual crisis.
 Third part: contains list of supporting plans (plans for each department and business unit leaders)
Finally, the plan includes policy, principles, goals, vision, scope, mission and definition statements to help align
crisis response with company culture and provide guidance for principle-based decision making. It establishes
authority levels, a posture for aggressive response, and defines roles and responsibilities for executives and their
organizations. Operational guidance, facilities, equipment, training and maintenance requirement are described at a
high level. A supporting organization is clearly defined, and command and control protocols are established so that
the company’s leadership can quickly activate a reliable, trained and integrated response organization during the
stressful and confusing events that accompany any catastrophic incident.
 Executive Summary Template for Crisis
Management
October 20, 2015 Business Word Templates Leave a comment 1,573 Views

http://www.wordtemplates.org/business-word-templates/executive-summary-template-for-crisis-management/
If you work in a company or run your own business, you understand the idea when a single person or
a team of directors are responsible to make a decision and chose strategies for the business, it’s not
possible for them to go through each proposal and report because they simply don’t have enough
time for these lengthy reports reviewing. A report, either it’s a proposal for new business or
progress summary about an existing project, it’s very common that it will consist on several pages
which are all very important for the reader to read. But the problem is that when the CEO of a
company is the one who makes all the decisions, he just doesn’t have enough time to read these
lengthy reports and business proposals. So the solution is to convert the lengthy report into much
shorter version or an overview that includes all the key points of the original one. This shortened
version of a report is called an executive summary which is exclusively written to save the luxurious
time of upper management and directors of a company.
Executive Summary of Crisis Management:
The crisis management is an organization process or tool that helps the businesses and companies to
foresee the upcoming problems and threats to the business and take essential steps to overcome
those issues before it’s too late. Basically a company faces two types of crisis; natural and artificial.
Natural crisis includes the floods, earthquakes and land sliding where the artificial disasters include
everything that is caused by humans or other living beings. These types of reports are very lengthy
and it usually includes about 10 to 20 pages for locating and describing the problem and suggesting
solutions for it. But those superiors or high level management that has the authority to make any final
decision won’t have time for these lengthy reports and proposals. So they prepare executive
summaries for crisis managements.

General Guidelines to create a Crisis Management Executive Summary:

1. Purpose:
The first and key element to include in this summary is allocating the main purpose of writing this
report and the basic idea behind all this. Here you define all the aspects and different point of views
about a lengthy crisis management report.

2. Planning:
Here you describe the planning you or your team has made to overcome the upcoming troubles in
the company. There is no need to provide everything because that will just kill the idea of preparing
this summarized report. You just need to provide a little something about everything.

3. Adopted procedures:
At this point you mention the strategies that you have made along with your management to
foreseen the upcoming problem and to solve it. This way you provide an overview of your planning
to the reader who, then decides if he is satisfied with it or there is something needs to be changed.

4. Reason of the Crisis Occurring:

Here you describe in short that what went wrong in the past which caused this trouble or crisis in
the company and what steps company should take to eliminate these kind of uncommon situations
in the future.

5. Suggestions:
At the end, after the reader has read the entire summary, you provide your suggestions according
to your thinking and experience. You should provide these suggestions at the end so that the
reader can compare it to his own conclusions.