The search is brief. As Mark Twain quipped, you can fool some of the people all the time. For whenever a ‘hot´ management principle bubbles up, there are always some form-over-substance chief executives eager to embrace the image but never the full essence of that alchemy.

Today, no management imperative is more urgent than corporate value improvement.

That calibre of CEO welcomes a Good Housekeeping-type stamp of approval affirming that his Underperformer Corp. has ticked all the boxes on a check list for compliance with MFV consciousness.

At first, only a few in the pop business press and even the financial community realize that awareness alone means almost nothing. Speed-reading a workbook on the topic of Managing for Results is far different than actually achieving those results.

The essence of solid value improvement is ACTIONS, and always has been. Misleading metrics and spaghetti-tangled value processes have never been more than the value side-show, and never will be. But just try to persuade the empire-building CEO to ‘walk the walk´ of value, rather than only spouting dazzle-prose words.

Finally getting serious about value involves a series of disagreeable choices.

Acknowledgement that the company´s ‘business model´ achieves far less value than the chief executive once claimed, as a simple question demands a complete answer: based on objective analysis not company propaganda, is this strategy massively value-creating?

Loss of the form-over-substance CEO´s internal patronage base as the Underperformer is forced to liberate itself of layer upon layer of value-depressing senior staff.

Necessary actions to stop the bleeding of ongoing value-destructive practices, which up to now have been disguised or hidden by astute spin.

Each day that the non-viable project, subsidiary or division is permitted to continue means a bit more value destruction, as reflected in the company´s valuation and share price. Every day that the convoluted promotions process endures causes the company´s value to sink a little further.

The same goes for the market development process where only 3% of the effort (and expense) pays for itself, or the R&D laboratory where value-losing pet projects persist, lest someone point the finger of accused failure.

Is this Underperformer Company unique? No—it is the great majority. Clark & Neill´s The Value Mandate suggests that even so-called well-managed companies typically miss half the available value that is available. Value that the owners of the company are today demanding as their´s.
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