Description
For 30 years, McKinsey's Valuation has taught leaders how to measure value. This book shows how to create it.
Strategy & Value: The Four Foundations That Drive Long-Term Performance is the executive's companion to Valuation. It’s a guide to the strategic decisions that promote exceptional, lasting value creation—from the firm that has advised more CEOs on strategy than any other.
Strategy should be getting better. Leaders have never had more frameworks, tools, and data to work with. Yet only one in five executives say their strategies would pass a rigorous test of quality, a 40 percent decline over 15 years. Meanwhile, the gap between economic profit winners and losers has been widening.
Why do some companies succeed while others lag behind? The winners focus on fundamentals that don’t change even when everything else does. This book distills those fundamentals into four foundations and shows how grounding strategy in them unlocks the bold, distinctive choices that build long-term value, even as artificial intelligence and geopolitics shake the business world. In this book, you’ll learn:
- Why most strategies fail the value test—and how to know whether yours will
- How to have the debates that matter: which businesses to own, what to acquire, what to divest, when to return cash
- How to lead through uncertainty—including how to apply timeless principles of value to AI
- How to make strategy an institutional discipline, not an annual event
Written for executives, board directors, founders, and investors, Strategy & Value is the book to read before your next big strategic decision—and to put in the hands of every leader coming up behind you.
When everything changes, the fundamentals don't.
Table of Contents
About the Authors xiii
Preface xv
Acknowledgments xvii
1 How Strategy Drives Value 1
Part One The Foundations of Value
2 Value Creation in a Nutshell 13
3 Foundation 1: Growth and ROIC 25
4 Foundation 2: Managing for the Long Term 43
5 Risk and the Opportunity Cost of Capital 53
Part Two The Foundations of Strategy
6 Strategy in a Nutshell 65
7 Foundation 3: Harnessing Market Attractiveness 71
8 Foundation 4: Building Competitive Advantage 91
9 Strategy in Moments of Change 113
Part Three The Foundations in Action
10 Deciding Which Businesses to Own 129
11 Acquiring to Accelerate Strategy 149
12 Divesting to Strengthen the Portfolio 167
13 Returning Cash to Shareholders 177
14 Applying Valuation Principles to AI and Digital Initiatives 189
15 Navigating Corporate Stewardship 199
Part Four Investor Communications and Value Myths
16 Prioritizing the Right Investors 215
17 Shaping Effective Investor Communications 223
18 Debunking Stock Market Myths 233
19 Linking Growth and ROIC to
20 Recognizing Stock Market Bubbles 261
21 Managing the Expectations Treadmill 271
22 Understanding Valuation Multiples 281
Part Five Making Strategy Happen
23 Mitigating Cognitive and Social Biases 295
24 Designing Strategy 307
25 Mobilizing to Execute Strategy 325
26 The CEO's Unique Role in Strategy and Value 337
27 The Discipline of Strategy and Value 353
Worksheets 357
Further Reading 363
Index 367
