What a board can read in twenty minutes

Non-executives in Georgian groups often travel between sites. They will not reconstruct a 40-page pack in a lift. The useful pack is the one that states the year in a sequence they can interrupt.

Put the questions on the cover

Not decorative titles. Actual questions: Can we fund the warehouse in November without stretching suppliers? Do we still believe the collection days we put in the plan? Which signed orders are missing from the forecast? If the chair cannot name three questions, the pack should wait. Composition without a question list becomes a gallery.

Cash before commentary

A strip of remaining months, with commitments underneath, does more than a paragraph about “headwinds”. Commentary belongs after a director has pointed at a bar. We keep type large enough to read across a table. Colour is used to mark signed versus hoped, not to make a month look fashionable.

One ugly appendix is allowed

The appendix we now include most often is purchase orders already signed that the forecast still treats as optional. It is not pretty. It ends a particular kind of optimism. If your pack cannot spare a page for that list, the sitting will spend its twenty minutes discovering the list in conversation, which is slower and harder on the secretary.