Today's companies don't need better managers. They need better value creators--individuals who understand not only the organizational process but the organizational dynamics that ensure continuing profits for a company and its shareholders. In this book, respected business educator Anjan Thakor presents managers with a pragmatic guide to creating value and boosting the success of their companies...while enhancing their own careers. Creating value is about more than making money in the short term. It's about incorporating the efforts of every employee into a business strategy that will support performance and profits over the long haul. It requires each member of a team to take ownership of the organizational assets he or she manages and translate organizational strategy into a personal plan of action. In separate chapters, Thakor gives individual managers of marketing, manufacturing, human resources, and finance specific guidelines for drafting that plan and overcoming the forces that can sabotage value. Using examples from all four of those business areas, as well as insights from leading value-creating companies, he presents five secrets that anyone can use to become a better value creator. The University of Michigan Business School Management Series is dedicated to providing managers with the practical tools they need to build their companies and their careers. Becoming a Better Value Creator tackles one of the biggest issues managers face today. By learning to recognize the factors critical to the ongoing success of their organizations, managers can go beyond maximizing short-term profits to serve the long-term interest of all the company's stakeholders while ensuring their own personal and professional fulfillment.

Why do some companies perform beyond expectation year after year while others start out strong but quickly fizzle? The answer lies in their ability to create long-term value. In this book, a leading professor at the top-ranked University of Michigan Business School presents five keys to creating value by incorporating the efforts of marketing, manufacturing, human resources, and finance in a strategy for continuing bottom-line success. His fresh look at what makes companies work shows managers how they can identify the factors that create value and use them to benefit their organizations and their own careers.

This book is about giving the CEO what he wants to know about Value creation and success.

Add value with every decision using a simple yet powerful framework Few things are as valuable in business, and in life, as the ability to make good decisions. Can you imagine how much more rewarding your life and your business would be if every decision you made were the best it could be? Decision Quality empowers you to make the best possible choice and get more of what you truly want from every decision. Dr. Carl Spetzler is a leader in the field of decision science and has worked with organizations across industries to improve their decision-making capabilities. He and his co-authors, all experienced consultants and educators in this field, show you how to frame a problem or opportunity, create a set of attractive alternatives, identify relevant uncertain information, clarify the values that are important in the decision, apply tools of analysis, and develop buy-in among stakeholders. Their straightforward approach is elegantly simple, yet practical and powerful. It can be applied to all types of decisions. Our business and our personal lives are marked by a stream of decisions. Some are small. Some are large. Some are life-altering or strategic. How well we make those decisions truly matters. This book gives you a framework and thinking tools that will help you to improve the odds of getting more of what you value from every choice. You will learn: The six requirements for decision quality, and how to apply them The difference between a good decision and a good outcome Why a decision can only be as good as the best of the available alternatives Methods for making both "significant" and strategic decisions The mental traps that undermine decision quality and how to avoid them How to deal with uncertainty—a factor in every important choice How to judge the quality of a decision at the time you're making it How organizations have benefited from building quality into their decisions. Many people are satisfied with 'good enough' when making important decisions. This book provides a method that will take you and your co-workers beyond 'good enough' to true Decision Quality.

PRAISE FOR VALUE CREATION PRINCIPLES "In Value Creation Principles, Madden introduces the Pragmatic Theory of the Firm that positions the firm as a system fueled by human capital, innovation, and, at a deeper level, imagination. He challenges us to understand how we know what we think we know in order to better discover faulty assumptions that often are camouflaged by language. His knowledge building loop offers guideposts to design experiments and organize feedback to facilitate early adaptation to a changed environment and to avoid being mired in ways of thinking rooted in 'knowledge' of what worked well in the past—a context far different from the context of today. His book explains a way of being that enables those who work for, or invest in, business firms to see beyond accounting silos and short-term quarterly earnings and to focus on capabilities instrumental for creating long-term future and sustainable value for the firm's stakeholders. I can't recommend this astounding book enough especially given its deep and timely insights for our world today." —John Seely Brown, former Chief Scientist for Xerox Corp and Director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); co-author with Ann Pendleton-Jullian of Design Unbound: Designing for Emergence in a White Water World "In contrast to existing abstract theories of the firm, Madden's pragmatic theory of the firm connects management's decisions in a practical way to a firm's life cycle and market valuation. The book promotes a firm's knowledge building proficiency, relative to competitors, as the fundamental driver of a firm's long-term performance, which leads to insights about organizational capabilities, intangible assets, and excess shareholder returns. Value Creation Principles is ideally suited to facilitate progress in the New Economy by opening up the process by which firms build knowledge and create value, which is a needed step in revising how neoclassical economics treats the firm." —Tyler Cowen, Professor of Economics, George Mason University; co-author of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution "Bartley Madden rightfully points out that both textbook and more advanced economic theories of the firm fail to address the concerns of top management and boards of directors. He offers a tantalizing pragmatic alternative that directly connects to quantitative changes in the firm's market value. His framework gives recognition to the importance of intangible assets, and his pragmatic approach is quite complementary to the Dynamic Capabilities framework that strategic managers implicitly and sometimes explicitly employ." —David J. Teece, Thomas W. Tusher Professor in Global Business, Faculty Director, Tusher Center for the Management of Intellectual Capital, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley