It's spring, which in corporate America means it's time for the annual reports. If you own a few shares of stock, or someone in your house does, you've seen them. Many are beautiful. Most are banal: full of jargon, vague mission statements and feel-good pictures of smiling customers, spotless manufacturing facilities and diverse employees. Here's Merrill Lynch's annual report, with several pages of beautiful photography. And here's the McDonald's annual—68 pages of good times, good food and good statistics.
It saddens me to say this—especially at a time when people in the word and image trades are suffering—but annual reports are archaic and essentially worthless. Those thuds you hear are hundreds of thousands of meticulously crafted marketing documents being dumped into the garbage can. Given that every American corporation is trying to be greener and save money, it's astonishing that annual reports are still produced.
Once upon a time, annual reports were a necessity. The New York Stock Exchange required companies that listed their stock on the exchange to send every shareholder an annual report—a document offering a state-of-the-company address from the CEO plus crucial operating data. In addition, the Securities and Exchange Commission required companies to send 10-Ks (detailed annual reports shorn of the PR junk) and proxy statements (like 10-Ks but with more information about compensation and the directors up for election). In their day these were highly useful documents: news organizations would keep collections of them, and professional investors could mine them for insight.
news source : http://www.newsweek.com/id/133228
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