The term “value creation” began trending up in the 1980’s.  Most noticeably on Wall Street through corporate legal teams and financiers that generated a continuous stream of headlines with “merger mania” and through entertainment to consumers via Hollywood movies; Wall Street, Working Girl and The Secret of My Success.  Now, you can criticize my taste in movies but I liked all of them.  And as my younger self I learned the basic concept that joining two or more things together “might increase” the value of the whole.  Years later the “might increase” lesson is still true, but in striving to be a value creator, I’ve learned to seek first to understand how value creation has evolved… focus, focus, focus!

In this series we will walk through how value creation has evolved since the 1980’s.  Taking a journey from then to today in effort to understand how each part of that evolution when joined together provides a template for you and me to become a value creators.

Our focus, focus, focus journey:

Part 1: Creating “corporate focus”

Senior executives achieve strategic growth objectives through market disruption by using technology, business models and quantitatively measuring the effectiveness of their strategies across distribution channels.  Often the challenge is that decisions that happen in the boardroom or at 50,000 feet get lost in translation. Therefore, our journey to become a value creator must begin with the initiative to learn and understand rather than wait to be informedabout corporate focus.

Part 2: Creating “customer focus”

For most of us, data is a cyclical (trending up/down) spreadsheet phenomenon that shows the results of our firms actions but leaves us patching together monthly and quarterly explanations of “why” it happened.  Simply put, if you’re solely following data about the past to make decisions about the future then I’ll bet you’re following market movers in development as well.  In part 2, we explore the journey to create offerings that take the lead fulfilling customer desire – which provides direction to creating customer focus.

Part 3: Creating “relational focus”

Transaction based relationships form around give and take agendas.  To some extreme they occasionally take the mentality of ‘what have you done for me lately’ and at that point one or both parties might be calling out, ‘Houston we have a problem!’ And therein lies the greatest risk, when value goes unmatched against what somebody else is willing to give for it.  In part 3, we will seek to understand where our involvement fits in to creating relational focus.

Part 4: How it all works together

The value creator model is lived out by each one of us every day.  In part 4, we will utilize the model to determine just how much value creation we can generate when we focus, focus, focus!

My challenge to you during this series is to; interact, provide feedback, and most of all share from your own experience on what you believe it takes to be a “Value Creator.”

Copyright 2015 – John Tudor