# Compression Craft: Summaries Executives Actually Absorb

An executive summary isn't a shorter version of the document — it's the document's *decisions*, extracted. The craft is knowing what survives compression and what dies.

## What survives (in priority order)

1. **The ask/decision** — what the reader must do or approve, first sentence territory
2. **The conclusion** — what the full document concluded (not what it investigated)
3. **The two numbers that matter** — of the forty in the document, the two that change the decision
4. **The material risk** — the one thing that could invalidate the conclusion
5. **The deadline & owner** — when this decays and who's holding it

## What dies in compression (and readers won't miss)

Methodology (one clause max: "based on 14 interviews and Q2 funnel data") · chronology ("first we… then we…") · hedging scaffolds ("it's worth noting that") · credit and effort narration · all but one example per point.

## The compression sequence

1. Write the ONE sentence you'd say if you met the exec in an elevator holding this doc
2. Add the 2-4 sentences that sentence needs to be believed
3. Add the risk sentence and the ask sentence
4. Stop. You're at ~120 words. Every addition now must evict something.

## Structural rules

- **BLUF absolutely** — conclusion before context, always; execs read until they know what's asked, then skim
- **Numbers with baselines** — "churn to 4.1%" means nothing; "churn 3.2% → 4.1% since March" is a summary in itself
- **No new information** — a summary that says things the document doesn't is a memo wearing a disguise
- **Standalone test** — a reader who NEVER opens the full document should still make the right decision from the summary alone; that's the bar, not "accurately previews the doc"

## Sentence-level compression moves

"conducted an analysis of" → "analysed" · "in order to" → "to" · "there is a risk that X may" → "X may" · "a significant increase" → "+34%" · passive → active (who did it). Each move is small; thirty of them halve the length with zero loss.