As I write this, my first book of poetry is going to press. I always wanted to be a poet. I took a year off early in my writing career and made a run at it, only to find that the romance of the poetic life does not pay the rent or utility bills. Now, nearly 25 years later, I have finally achieved my dream and managed to meet my monthly financial obligations – and then some.
The only problem is that my first published collection of poetry appears between the covers of an annual report. Yes, an annual report. One that I was commissioned to write back in February and happily signed on to do, having little idea that it would bring out the best (or perhaps the worst) Emily Dickinson in me. The company, which of course I can’t name, is one you would readily recognize. Because it is offshore and doesn’t trade on a US exchange, its annual report is not subject to a regulatory timetable or oversight. Still, it was seeking to produce something that roughly resembled the standard format of an SEC-sanctioned document: glossy, artfully designed cover, chairman’s letter, description of businesses, financials, and some back matter describing the individual divisions in a standardized way.
I was warned when I signed on that this company would not be forthcoming in providing me with information for the book. Moreover, I would never have any contact with the company, except through several layers of intermediaries. That was fine. Meeting with the company directly would have been geographically awkward for me anyway, and sometimes meetings are – how can I put this delicately – a waste of time. I recalled an orientation week spent years ago in the searing September heat of Memphis, Tennessee, meeting all day long with the upper and lower echelons of the accounting and finance departments of a company that had hired me to pen its annual. I took myriad pages of notes on yellow lined legal pads and in the end it was decided that the financials should (rightfully, I thought) be written by those accountants and financial people, with my editorial hand passing over their words to help make them comprehensible.
Since I had purchased an entire wardrobe of business suits in order to participate in these meetings, I felt that not just time but money had been lost. The suits were never worn again.
My attitude toward annual reports and annual report writing has loosened up considerably over the two decades I’ve been engaged in the sport. I’ve come to regard annual report assignments as more typing than writing, to paraphrase Capote on Kerouac. But still, that typing is typically guided, often overguided, by internal communications groups that are, in effect, stakeholders in the outcome of the annual report. They set the theme, typically tied to some articulated strategic master plan. I do expect to meet with at least some of the important folks at the company I am writing about, and get some notion of what they’d like to emphasize: a focus, a message, something.
But this last experience was completely different. Instead of building the report from the message up, my first assignment was to come up with a catchy title. Okay, I thought, maybe that’s just for the mock-up, and once the report is written, we’ll title it appropriately. So for the first two weeks I wrote titles, basing them essentially on nothing. They were passed up the ranks and rejected. I wrote more titles, submitting a dozen at a time. They’d be dropped into a proposed cover design and sent back into the system.
Master planning
One day, out of the blue, I was informed that one had hit the mark. Then, as soon as that ordeal was over, I was asked to come up with some section titles. This again was a challenging assignment, since I had no idea what this annual report was supposed to be about. Just when I was starting to feel that this whole affair was getting a little strained, I was asked to produce three concept proposals. ‘Aha,’ I thought. ‘Now we’re getting back on track.’
I set out trying to find some content to put in the outlines. I scoured the web sites of the company and its many subsidiaries for clues as to what the company was all about and what it might like to be all about in the future. I created some catchy subheads and threw some callouts in. Even though it was a little backwards to be writing section titles before the sections were written, the words tumbled like water over a dam onto the paper. ‘Damn,’ I thought. ‘I’m making this whole thing up.’
These copy outlines went through a couple of revisions and then disappeared into a black hole for about a month. Then, right when I least expected it (of course), I was told that I should produce a copy outline for an amalgam of two of the proposals. Again, I was somewhat at a loss as to what to include in this outline, but I was getting used to this routine, so I went to my hitherto reliable resources – and just made it up.
Does it really matter?
A few more weeks passed and I forgot about the project for a while. By the beginning of May I had the feeling that I should really start writing, given the target publication date of mid-June. So I started on the letter to shareholders, relying on a single document that had come from the chairman’s office several months earlier. It was both delightfully and frighteningly easy. Then, I began to draft the sections of the report.
What was truly dumbfounding about this process was not just the unfettered freedom I had to write this book, but how it threatened to expose, in an emperor-has-no-clothes sort of way, the whole raison d’être of corporate communications: to craft, advocate and staunchly defend, at all costs, the company message.
I mean, I have lived through dozens of annual report seasons when grown men and women came to blows over the order of words in a single sentence because of the potential damage it could do to the company’s articulated mission and reputation. And here was this company basically saying, ‘It doesn’t matter at all.’ I began to feel, in an existential sort of way, that nothing was important – except of course the company’s products and how well they satisfy whatever they purport to satisfy.
Next year, I’m hoping to get the assignment again and take it to new levels – maybe I’ll give iambic pentameters a try.
