An executive summary, sometimes known as a 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 will usually contain 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[1][2] and has been described as possibly the most important part of a business plan[3].
An executive summary differs from an abstract in that an abstract will usually be shorter and is intended to provide a neutral 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 would be meaningless. "An abstract is a brief summarizing statement [which]... must be able to stand alone", while "an executive summary, unlike an abstract, is a document in miniature that may be read in place of the longer document"[4].
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There is wide general agreement on the structure of a "typical" executive summary - books and training courses emphasise similar points.[5][6][7][8][9][10] Typically, an executive summary will
The importance of executive summaries as a communication tool is frequently stressed in guides and analyses aimed at both academics and business people. 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]
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 around 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]