The art of writing an annual report

For those of you outside the C-suite, writing an annual report is a tremendous effort that requires months of preparation by copywriters, accountants and almost everyone the floor. The numbers of course have to be razor-blade sharp with no Enron-style conversion, but crunching numbers is not a difficult task per se.

What’s immensely difficult is coming up with the right combination of words to reassure the shareholder that we’re not screwing up things and that absolutely everything including our pencils are under tight control. After reading a CGI annual report, you should have the overwhelming impression and we are the best company in the galaxy quadrant, our people are the crème de la crème and that all our clients are among the top 1% of the best managed organizations and that they do business with CGI because they are on top of the world.

Which brings me to government clients.

Writing that government is a well-managed organization is like saying Lindsay Lohan is a clean sober young woman who has her priority straight. Yet, we can’t write that our government clients are doomsday machines gobbling huge budgets with no visible results. Here’s what we wrote last year in our annual reports

Governments at all levels face unprecedented pressures, such as economic constraints, healthcare challenges and accountability demands. To manage an effective response, organizations must create leaner and more high-performance structures.

Can you name me one – just one – lean and high-performance government structure? Of course you can’t, because such thing is a fantasy. Maybe the White House kitchen is efficient I’ll concede but they sure at not lean. This is wishful thinking, government are by definition obese and since no one is accountable there cannot be any performance. Tectonic plates move much faster than anything in the government world.

So we do our best to write government stories with a twist that make them look interesting, and this is no small task. We first handpick government projects that didn’t derail totally and where the scope of work didn’t change 10 times in a year. Then, we isolate projects where the client didn’t make headlines for burning taxpayer money in dubious initiatives. The final selection is so small you could use a crippled hand to count it.

Finally, the people who write our annual reports were not involved in the project so there’s no personal frustration involved. And they live in another country, so they don’t know jack about this government client, their taxes didn’t fuel this project, so those people have a pretty neutral view of the situation.

Our '09 annual report is coming soon, dear members. I don't want to spark any false rumors, but it may be our last, so treasure it.