Late 90s saw a surge of WW---D? themes in and churches and synagogues, sometimes becoming such a mantra that made it all the way to the ultimate media, automobile bumper stickers (one of our partner´s recently deceased father erected a WW—D? sign on the front of his aging Winnebago, paradoxically nicknamed the “Cathouse” since the vehicle also transports the family´s feline pets).

Then, Scott Adams made a splash and got a laugh in one of his Dilbert cartoons when he used “D”—standing for the diabolical sociopath-consultant Dogbert, for use in a mantra to be chanted at the client company: What, after all, WOULD Dogbert Do? (WWDD)

Yes, boys and girls, the time has come for another four consonant mantra. “What Would Shareholders Say?” or WWSS? Truth is, a company might apply any one of the half dozen of upper tier valuation formulas, or pursue elaborate (if not necessarily productive) faux-value data-crunching exercises. But unless WWSS is foremost in everyone´s mind at the company, "achieving maximum shareholder value" is nothing more than PR throwaway fluff.

Employees at a FMCG company in Southern California are struggling to regain lost value penalty imposed on shareholders for four consecutive years because of management miscues and persistent, bloated costs compared to the competition.

A small group of corporate heroes take forthright corrective action: a CEO-sanctioned group devises a significant, well-planned program to extend past facilities management value improvements to more operations, increasing corporate shareholder value by billions. But it´s no go, for a variety of suboptimal excuses. The losers? Company shareholders see even more dollar bills flying out their wallets as if on wings, even faster.

At a telecommunications company in Europe, internal rivalries between competing groups underly a tragedy in the true sense of that word. The telco´s investment in one of the rare Internet champion companies of netPhase II is dumped for virtually nothing, destroying massive corporate value.

At yet another firm, the chairman´s pipe dream of an ego-gratifying but untenable consumer product results in billions more in terms of lost corporate wealth (Does our executive incentive program SUBTRACT for value destroyed? Whew--- that´s a break).

The answer to such active value destruction? Process-types like to say that the answer is yet another grand flow chart, but value suboptimalizers side-step such machinations with ease. Out-of-work academicians retreat to “governance” and the ethical high ground of Board leadership, but such progress is glacial. Unless you have CalPERS or Hermes Lens on your Board, many review groups are still rubber stamps, and we all know it.

So what DOES work? Often, the simplest answer. What if, from the top down, everyone asks and thinks carefully about WHAT WOULD SHAREHOLDERS SAY? What would shareholders say in the case of that California firm where they were effectively handed the bill FOR BILLIONS in lost value because a couple of crony underperforming managers blew it? WHAT WOULD SHAREHOLDERS SAY at that telecommunications company where Euro notes fly out of shareholders´ collective wallets because a key stake in the Internet´s 2002-3 rebound is missed?

Value destruction becomes rampant value creation ONLY when everyone in the corporation knows WWSS and takes it to heart as a daily guide to action. The beginning quote in Chapter 8 of the new shareholder value best-seller, VBM Consulting´s THE VALUE MANDATE (by Clark & Neill, amazon.com, amazon.co.uk) originates from The Economist.

It goes like this: “Managers want to build empires; shareholders, numerous and unorganized have often been powerless to stop them.” Process alone underachieves, as does ´governance´ grand schemes. ONLY when the CEO continually asks WWSS? and insists that all others in the company do the same, does that corporation have a chance of becoming (or remaining) a true outperformer, value-wise.
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