With consumers and investors losing confidence in corporate America, executives are under heightened pressure to perform. As the risk of failure grows ever greater, executives scramble for solid principles to help them prosper.

If you are an executive, you want to know how to create higher levels of value for your employees, customers, and communities. You want to power your organization to superior profitability in bad times and good.

In Value Leadership, renowned management and investment expert Peter Cohan-whose 2002 stock picks gained 81 percent when the S&P 500 plunged 24 percent-provides a new and powerful concept of sustainable corporate value. Using his expertise in understanding shareholder value, Cohan offers executives seven management principles that were tested in periods of economic expansion and contraction. These principles are: valuing human relationships, fostering teamwork, experimenting frugally, fulfilling your commitments, fighting complacency, winning through multiple means, and giving to your community. Cohan illustrates these principles by drawing on examples from eight Value Leaders-Synopsys, WalMart, Goldman Sachs, MBNA, Johnson & Johnson, J. M. Smucker, Southwest Airlines, and Microsoft. Through two recessions, these companies grew 35 percent faster, were 109 percent more profitable, and generated five times more shareholder wealth than their peers.

Cohan offers a tool, the Value Quotient-which is tightly linked to this superior performance-to help executives quantify their performance and learn from the Value Leaders' best practices.

In Value Leadership, renowned management and investment expert Peter Cohan - whose 2002 stock picks gained 81percent when the S&P 500 plunged 24 percent- provides a new and powerful concept of sustainable corporate value. Using his expertise in understanding shareholder value, Cohan offers executives seven management principles that were tested in periods of economic expansion and contraction. These principles are: valuing human relationships, fostering teamwork, experimenting frugally, fulfilling your commitments, fighting complacency, winning through multiple means, and giving to your community. Cohan illustrates these principles by drawing on examples from eight Value Leaders- Synopsys, WalMart, Goldman Sachs, MBNA, Johnson & Johnson, J. M. Smucker, Southwest Airlines, and Microsoft. Through two recessions, these companies grew 35 percent faster, were 109 percent more profitable, and generated five times more shareholder wealth than their peers.



About the Author

Peter S. Cohan is president of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. He has written seven books, including The Technology Leaders (Jossey-Bass, 1997), which was selected as one of the ten best management books of 1997 by Management General, and Net Profit (Jossey-Bass, 2001), which the Washington Post called "A savvy, discriminating guide to Internet business." He has appeared on Good Morning America, CNN, and CNBC and has been quoted in the New York Times,Time,Fortune,and Business Week. Cohan is also an executive-in-residence at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts.