Whether I’m teaching Finance to MBAs at the Wharton School, or enabling executives through Blue Line Intelligence, my work is all about how we do what we do and keep our jobs. When you get down to it, it’s all pretty simple. Create value and your firm survives. Destroy value, and you’re dead.

Many managers claim to understand value creation. I can tell you from decades of teaching, founding businesses, and consulting, most managers have only a superficial grasp of the concept, let alone a clear plan on how to go about actually doing it. It’s why I and my co-author S. David Young wrote The Blue Line Imperative. It’s also why I’ve been invited by executives around the world to educate their managers on corporate valuation, defining and managing for value, and corporate governance. 

If you’re sitting in one of my lectures or workshops, or even chatting with me over a beer, you’ll hear four core concepts repeated: Value, Value Creation, Managing for Value, and Valuation. They may sound the same, but they’re not. You may think you are managing for value, but based on our research you probably are not. 

But I don’t know, I could be wrong. As always, it depends. You’ll hear me say “Kevin is always wrong,” because no matter how much I think (or believe) I am right, the simple reality is that belief has no relevance to the question of whether I am actually right. The same applies to you, your managers, your customers, your suppliers, your investors - everyone. 

There’s a lot more I could cover here (I’m known for long slide decks, and a high word to minute ratio). But for now I’ll leave it at this:

There are technical skills, principles, and concepts for you to master, but more than anything, managing for value - what David and I call “Blue Line Management” - is a mindset. It includes ideas like:

• Focus on process.

• Remember we live in a probabilistic world.

• Until you’ve removed your assumptions, checked your bias, and are making data-driven decisions: you don’t know. And even then, it depends.