President Obama faced the task of giving the annual report to the nation’s shareholders in the 2011 State of the Union Address on Tuesday evening. He addressed that task carefully, with his usual aplomb, but with a lack of innovation in structure or delivery that means the speech will soon be forgotten.
It’s essentially the problem faced by most CEOs of large organizations. How do you report on all the multifarious activities of the firm in the past year without resorting to a laundry list or information dump that will inevitably turn tedious and undercut one of the very goals of the talk: to establish that the state of the organization is strong, purposeful, and headed in the right direction?
