Value Above Cost: Driving Superior Financial Performance with CVA, the Most Important Metric You've Never Used

by Donald E. Sexton

This book systematically explains how to maximize shareholder value. Columbia University's Don Sexton fully identifies the real drivers of shareholder value, unifying key concepts from marketing, branding, economics, management, finance, accounting, and statistics. Sexton introduces a powerful new Customer Value Added (CVA), the difference between customer-perceived value and variable cost per unit. Next, he demonstrates CVA at work, presents research and case studies that prove its value, and shows how to use it to consistently measure, manage, and optimize profit, cash flow, and shareholder value. Readers will learn why CVA works; how to measure it; how changes in CVA correlate to changes in profits and cash flow; and how to use CVA to steer the enterprise. Along the way, Sexton illuminates CVA's key implications for managers, including why managers must focus attention simultaneously on both customers and costs, and why well-publicized "generic strategies" such as "net recommend" offer only part of the solution. Finally, drawing on his own extensive experience consulting on CVA and related issues, Sexton presents easy-to-use worksheets for translating CVA concepts into reality in your own organization.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published February 20, 2009