Excerpts from the Introduction

Tell It to the CEO:
How to Write Compelling Executive Summaries and Briefings
By Angela J. Maniak

Meeting the Demands of Executives

"Give me a one-page summary," demands the CEO of a Fortune 100 company.
"Tell me what issues I need to know about, what needs to be done, and who is
responsible for action steps. If everything is okay, let me know that, too." Such a
demand may send you to your computer screen, writing and rewriting, deciding
what to chop and what to keep in such a brief report. "After weeks and weeks of
analysis," you may wonder, "how can I boil all my observations down to a page
or less?"

Challenging as it may be, writing a powerful and persuasive executive
summary or presentation is critical to your successful communication with
top management. Whatever type of service you provide, it is what you
communicate that forms the basis for management's decision-making.
Acceptance of your proposal, recommendation, or analysis is largely influenced
by what you put in writing.

While your work may produce volumes of valuable information, you have only
a few minutes to convey your ideas to executive management. You need to
capture the executives' attention, tell them what they need to know, and make
sure they understand the implications of what they have read. Often, you must
do all this in a one-page executive summary or a five-minute briefing.

Executives read summaries and attend briefings for one reason only—to
get information that will influence their decision-making. When you write an
executive summary, you are using your best (and sometimes only) chance to
influence actions and decisions that directly affect you and your organization.
When top management requests or receives an executive summary from you,
they are looking for your analysis of an issue, your opinion or conclusion on a
topic, or your recommendations for action. Your executive summaries must be
powerful enough to meet the high expectations readers have of your work.
While the benefits of a well-written executive summary are great, the costs of
a poorly written one are also significant. A summary that misses the mark may
leave executives with unanswered questions, misinterpretations of data, or false
assurances.

Copyright 2005 Angela J. Maniak

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Why an Entire Book on Writing Such a Short Summary?

It should be easy—and fast—to develop an executive summary or briefing, right?
After all, it is short—often only one page or a few slides—and it is drawn from a
detailed report you have already spent a lot of time writing. It should be a snap to
slap that executive summary together.

The truth, though, is that the briefest of documents is often the hardest to write.
Sure, you can quickly write a short overview of your detailed project, but will it be
a compelling read to executives? Will it capture attention and generate conviction
to your key points? Will executives remember your summary, value it, and
act on it?

Writing a powerful executive summary is hard work, and this book will guide you
through the process so that it becomes a manageable and successful task. After
20 years of reading bland and even boring executive summaries, I am committed
to helping you turn the tide and "Tell It to the CEO" so that he or she hears your
message and remembers it.

The goal of my book is to enable you to present the best of your work in the
very best light. I want to make it easy for you to accomplish this by following the
step-by-step approach I recommend.

If you practice the techniques in this book, you will be able to write executive
summaries and briefings that:

• Focus on key points of importance to executives.
• Convey the significance of your ideas.
• Present issues from an executive perspective.
• Describe issues clearly, concretely, and concisely.
• Display your ideas in an appealing layout.

You will learn through practical, specific tips and real-life examples how to
condense a detailed, lengthy, or complex project into a concise, concrete, and
compelling summary. You will understand what executives want to hear from
you and how they want to hear it. You will be able to use proven techniques
to write an executive summary as brief as one page—and still tell executives
everything you want them to know.

In this book, I tackle the problem of how to say meaningful things to high-level
readers in very few words. I share proven techniques that I have developed over
20 years of coaching business professionals on how to "Tell It to the CEO."

Copyright 2005 Angela J. Maniak

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