A good friend of mine who manages a major global consumer drinks brand recently told me of a particularly embarrassing error he’d made. I want him to stay a good friend and so he’ll remain nameless.

His mistake was made during a presentation to his company’s Board about how his brand had outperformed the market to deliver exceptional global profits and close the gap on competitors. As you’d expect, the big chiefs were delighted with this news and they immediately briefed the press using this success as evidence of the wise business decisions they’d taken over the previous quarter. My friend sat back and waited for the bonus / offers of promotion to roll in.

The problem was that shortly afterwards he discovered that the figures he’d given them were wrong. His brand had actually lost ground and when the global performance reports were cross-checked in more detail a few weeks later he found himself in the unenviable position of having to go back to the Board to give them the bad news. The reaction they gave is not printable.

My friend felt pretty bad about what happened, and not just because it very nearly cost him his job. He’s an excellent marketer and thought he could rely on the information he received from his different reporting teams. In fact his mistake – to inaccurately aggregate performance information from across the globe - is one that is repeated on an alarmingly regular basis by people responsible for reporting on global products.

The problem stems from the fact that the top-level global view that Boards want requires information to be gathered and analyzed from across many different business units and geographies. When the Board barks a question, a small army of analysts typically drop what they are doing and, through spreadsheets and a lot of sweat, they work round the clock to try and get the figures they need.

For many large companies such top-level questions are either answered wrongly, as in the case of my unfortunate friend, or end up joining a list of “frequently unanswered questions”. What makes it so difficult to get a quick and accurate picture of corporate performance is that information is usually held in multiple incompatible reporting systems in different formats across the globe.