The Value Mandate: Maximizing Shareholder Value Across the Corporation.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Review

Peter J. Clark Stephen Neill. Amacom, 331 pages. $40.

The Value Mandate is a challenging book, complex and argumentative. The authors, partners at VBM Consulting, attack conventional thinking with strongly worded presentations on the foundations of value and the opportunities companies have to develop it. A key premise is that value is not an abstraction, but is "real, concrete, and created one specific action at a time."

Using case studies and histories drawn from a number of corporations, the authors examine such processes as demand/pull flexible production, advanced confirmed-order customer arrangements and "antidote" innovation development -- products or services created as a counter-innovation, like automobile radar detectors.

A real strength of this book is its pull-no-punches language, notable in a field where flaccid wordiness often dominates. Two examples...