Fluor Displays Corporate Humor

Tired of the corporate-logo, headquarters-photo, charts-and-graphs look, Fluor Corp. made a big change in the cover of its annual report this year. The Irvine company hired New Yorker cartoonist Danny Shanahan to convey the corporate message with pen and ink.

“Dilbert” creator Scott Adams won’t have to worry about Fluor stealing his thunder as a stinging critic of corporate management, but Fluor officials admit it was the popularity of the “Dilbert” strip that prompted them to lighten up.

Sid Cato, a Kalamazoo, Mich.-based corporate report critic, said it is still rare for big corporations to experiment with their annual reports. Cartoons can work if they convey the proper message, he said, “but you don’t want to be a staid brokerage firm with a cartoon-filled annual report that tells people that you’re getting a little wild and crazy.”

Little danger of that in the Fluor report. The cover illustration is pretty bland, although two of the four cartoons inside the 45-page booklet do poke a little fun. One shows a safe crammed with cash behind the desk of a chief financial officer explaining that Fluor is fiscally conservative. Another suggests that Fluor is missing the boat by not changing its profitable coal mining operation’s name to something trendy, like “Cyber-Coal.”

(The cover, for the record, shows an airplane filled with gray-suited business executives. One of them holds a copy of an annual report with Fluor’s logo on the cover, turns to his seatmate and, parroting the chairman’s message inside, says, “Accelerating growth? No borders, no limits? Who are these people?”)

Lee Tashjian, Fluor’s vice president for corporate relations, says the idea came from a brainstorming session on how to make the annual report different. Using the cartoons, he says, gets the report noticed.

It also was less expensive than hiring a professional photographer to shoot color photos--although Tashjian says cost wasn’t an issue. The decision came from Fluor Chairman Les McCraw, who had the final say and reportedly loved the idea of using cartoons.

John O’Dell covers major Orange County corporations and manufacturing for The Times. He can be reached at (714) 966-5831 and at john.odell@latimes.com