# Examples — Executive Summary House Style ## Contents - Opening-sentence pairs - Complete worked example (bad → house style) - The "no recommendation yet" variant - Gotchas ## Opening-sentence pairs | ❌ Never | ✅ House style | |---|---| | "This report presents the findings of our infrastructure review." | "Recommendation: consolidate to one cloud region, saving $84k/yr at negligible latency cost." | | "Over the past quarter, the team has been analyzing churn." | "Churn doubled in Q2 (4.1% → 8.3%); the driver is the March pricing change, and we recommend reverting it for accounts under 50 seats." | | "Several options were considered for the mobile strategy." | "We should ship the responsive web app now and defer the native app 12 months; this captures 80% of the value at 20% of the cost." | ## Complete worked example **❌ Bad version (methodology-first, adjectives, no pick):** > **Executive Summary** > > As part of our ongoing commitment to operational excellence, a > cross-functional working group was convened to evaluate our customer > support tooling. The group conducted stakeholder interviews, reviewed > industry benchmarks, and assessed three leading platforms across a > comprehensive evaluation matrix. Each option presents meaningful benefits. > Platform A offers robust automation. Platform B provides significant > flexibility. Platform C is a strong contender on price. The working group > presents these options for leadership consideration. Adoption of a new > platform is expected to substantially improve response times and deliver > considerable cost efficiencies. **✅ House-style version:** > **Executive Summary** > > **Recommendation:** adopt Platform A for customer support, replacing > Zendesk in Q4. Net saving: $61k/yr; payback in 7 months (high confidence — > pricing is contracted, migration quoted). > > **Why:** > - Automation resolves an estimated 38% of tier-1 tickets (measured in our > 3-week pilot: 41% on 1,200 tickets). > - First-response time drops from 6.2h to under 1h for automated categories. > - Only option meeting our EU data-residency requirement out of the box. > > **Cost & risk:** > - $45k migration (one-time) + $9k/mo licence (vs $14k/mo today). > - Risk: agent adoption → mitigation: 2-week parallel run, champions per team. > - Risk: data-migration loss → mitigation: vendor-managed migration with > row-count verification; Zendesk kept read-only for 90 days. > > **Next step:** sign by Aug 15 (quote expiry); IT kickoff Aug 18. Owner: S. Boucher. > > *Methodology and full scoring matrix: appendix B.* ## The "no recommendation yet" variant > **Executive Summary** > > **We cannot yet recommend a platform:** the two finalists are tied on cost > and features, and the deciding factor — EU data-residency certification for > Platform B — is unconfirmed. Vendor answer due Aug 12; we will issue the > recommendation Aug 13. If forced to decide today, Platform A (the > reversible choice: month-to-month contract). ## Condensing an existing report (summary-at-the-top variant) When the summary heads a longer document, it must stand alone — assume most readers stop after it. | ❌ Never | ✅ House style | |---|---| | "As detailed in section 4…" (forces the jump) | State the number here; cite the section in parentheses for the curious. | | "See below for our recommendation." | The recommendation is sentence one of the summary itself. | | Summarizing section by section in document order | Reorganize into Recommendation → Rationale → Cost & Risk regardless of the report's structure. | | New information that appears only in the summary | Everything in the summary exists in the body; the summary selects, never adds. | ## Gotchas - **The summary written before the analysis ends** becomes advocacy. Write the recommendation sentence only when you can defend its number. - **"High/medium/low confidence" without basis** is an adjective in disguise — attach what makes it high ("contracted pricing", "n=1,200 pilot"). - **Percentage without base** ("38% of tickets") invites the first hostile question; give the base once ("of 1,200 pilot tickets"). - **Next step without an owner and date** means no next step. - **Executive summaries of bad news** follow the same BLUF rule — burying "we lost the account" in paragraph three reads as spin, not tact.