At Mannwest Group and Mannkal Foundation we invest in a wide range of publicly listed companies as we are dependent on their continuing cash flow and dividend yields.
This is the life-blood to enable us to expand our current activities.
Naturally, we read each company’s annual report in an attempt to understand the culture behind each company, hoping that this will give us some insight into their future success.
I have written elsewhere about the current trend toward political correctness where Chair & CEO’s reports these days appear to be written by junior P.R. flacks and apart from being incredibly bland and boring, they do meet the requirements of having the correct number of words to fill the page and are littered with meaningless terms such as “sustainability”, “corporate social license to operate” and “environmentally friendly”.
Although, meeting their P.R. requirements, these reports usually give very little insight into the nature of the thinking of the people running your company.
We had to go all the way back to 2015 to find a company that dared to present their story in a form that revealed their own thoughts and plans for the company, following the Chairman’s and CEO’s reports with a two page story “The OneVue Philosophy – People and Culture“, which incorporated a theme that they followed, illustrated by “The twenty mile march – the story of Amundsen vs Scott”.
Please note that we are not giving you investment advice so it should not be taken as such. However, we raise this subject for two reasons:-
- This is an outstanding communications strategy for explaining the general thrust and strategy of their company.
- The story of Amundsen vs Scott is also a story that explains our Mannkal Foundation’s strategy which is to fill in the gap of life sustaining strategies (mostly economic) that might currently be missing from the next generation’s formal education.
What are your findings as you peruse this year’s crop of company annual reports?
Regards
Ron
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