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Comment by dao- | Hacker News Reader

Anyone else irritated by the "Executive Summary" heading for what I think most would call an abstract? As a non-native speaker I had to look up the term to confirm it meant what I guessed it would mean: summary meant for executives as in a corporation's "executive officers".

Always breaks my heart to see corporate speak creep into normal speak :(

Btw, "Executive Summary" being listed under "Summary" also seems weird. I'd call that a table of contents.

Feeling particularly nitpicky today.

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"Executive Summary" is an inoffensive way to say "Look, I know you cannot understand this and/or will not read this, so here's a small amount of text written simply that you can use to make a decision."

Yeah... That's called a "summary". But people made trouble by calling the table of contents a summary, and the name is now ambiguous.

Not exactly. Say for example you’re in a situation where an executive has to approve the budget of an engineering project they are not able to understand. A summary would do no good, because it would be incomprehensible to them.

In other words, an executive summary is the summary for a non-expert stakeholder. In practice you use this to tell the executive what you want them to think.

> In other words, an executive summary is the summary for a non-expert stakeholder. In practice you use this to tell the executive what you want them to think.

...no, an executive summary is not "a summary for a clueless executive". An executive summary provides enough information to act on the material... that is, a summary that promotes executive function[0], otherwise known as decision-making based on what it is summarizing.

The "executive" here is not a noun, it's the same "executive" as in "executive function" and "executive decision". And yes, it's also where the job role gets its name.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_functions

> The "executive" here is not a noun

I understand, but in this case that’s a distinction without a difference. For whom is the executive summary? For the person making the executive decision, ie the executive.

In my career, executive summaries are crafted to guide the executive to the outcome desired by the author. Perhaps that’s unique to my experience.

It's just that "the executive" in this case doesn't refer to "someone with the job role of executive", it refers to any reader capable of making their own informed decisions. The role of an executive summary is to inform them enough for them to make a mostly-accurate decision (compared to the decision they would've made if they instead read everything that was being summarized).

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