There is general agreement on the structure of an executive summary for business use - books and training courses emphasise similar points.
For example, members of Texas A&M University's Department of Agricultural Economics observe that "An executive summary is an initial interaction between the writers of the report and their target readers: decision makers, potential customers, and/or peers.
"[11] It has been said that, by providing an easy digest of an often complex matter, an executive summary can lead policy makers and others to overlook important issues.
In one study, centred on globalization, she found that policy makers face "pressures to adopt a simple reading of complex issues" and "to depoliticise and universalize all sorts of differences".
[13] Similarly Colin Leys, writing in The Socialist Register, argues that executive summaries are used to present dumbed down arguments: "there is remarkably little adverse comment on the steep decline that has occurred since 1980 in the quality of government policy documents, whose level of argumentation and use of evidence is all too often inversely related to the quality of their presentation (in the style of corporate reports, complete with executive summaries and flashy graphics).