Value Leadership: the 7 Principles that Drive Corporate Value in Any Economy.

• Author: Marshall, Jeffrey
• Position: Brief Article - Book Review

Value Leadership: The 7 Principles that Drive Corporate Value in Any Economy. By Peter S. Cohan. Jossey-Bass, 312 pages. $27.95

The core concept for this book, Peter Cohan writes, comes from research he did on top-performing companies, especially those that had done well in both boom and bust markets. In actuality, he screened the 1,500 largest publicly traded companies on a series of 11 qualitative and quantitative factors, and emerged with a top eight he identifies as value leaders--and not "value" in the investing sense of picking beaten-down stocks in the hopes they will recover.

In analyzing these eight companies-Goldman Sachs & Co., Johnson & Johnson, Wal-Mart, Southwest Airlines, Microsoft Corp., credit card giant MBNA, J.M Smucker and semiconductor maker Synopsys--Cohan developed a series of common threads that he developed into a "value leadership" model. Not all the companies excel on all counts, he assures us, but their overall performance clearly outranks peers.

The seven core principles can be summarized quickly: value human relationships, foster teamwork...