Last week I was moonlighting, facilitating training in participation techniques for management and education professionals.  These individuals, amongst them a financial director currently working for a small UK manufacturing company, were about to embark on assignments far removed from their current day to day.

CIMA Sri Lanka recently held a focus group discussion among industry leaders to discuss the way forward for corporate reporting in Sri Lanka.

Twitter, Facebook, iPhone Apps - not the usual stuff of a blog focussing on corporate reporting but then times-are-a-changing. 

Not so many years ago, I was involved in the production of an annual report for an international group that involved many late nights at the printers checking proof copies of the final report.  Once we were finally sure that every ‘t' was crossed and ‘i' dotted and the page breaks were in the right place we allowed the presses to roll.

‘If you want to launch big ships you have to go where the water is deep'.  The source of this quote is unknown but it sums up where the Tomorrow's Corporate Reporting (TCR) Team are.  The big ship refers to the important question we are trying to answer ‘what has held corporate reporting back from developing into a really effective communication tool?'  And the deep water?  Well this is a global survey and although I am an avid amateur stargazer that's about as far as we can go at this stage.

Following England’s tense victory over Slovenia in the World Cup this week which I watched with fellow CIMA staff in the Council Chamber, I attended a Tomorrow’s Corporate Reporting project meeting with colleagues from Tomorrow’s Company and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The meeting was significantly more relaxed but nonetheless successful.

From a consolidated breakfast, through an afternoon at the Royal Society of Arts, to a stampede out of London to avoid the tube strike, Wednesday was interesting to say the least.  And as for the parallel universe, read on…