Corporate Value Creation: An Operations Framework for Nonfinancial Managers

Corporate Value Creation offers business leaders and managers—no matter what their expertise in financial matters—a guide and proven framework to help optimize decision making, grow revenue, and increase profitability. Step by step, Lawrence C. Karlson offers a clear understanding of the qualitative and quantitative aspects of managing a business.

This invaluable resource is filled with detailed information on financial statements, valuation, modeling and forecasting, and other aspects of essential business activities. The author includes a discussion of the best practices management needs to adopt if they are to successfully improve bottom-line productivity. Filled with illustrative examples, and comprehensive in scope, the book explores the basics of income statements, balance sheets, and cash flow statements. Then, using critical concepts like Weighted Average Cost of Capital, Karlson outlines the strategies and best practices for managing Return on Capital Employed. He also includes detailed discussions of pricing-driven models and defines the characteristics and attributes of several value-added models.

Corporate Value Creation brings together the concepts associated with understanding financial statements and shows how management's day-to-day operational approaches (including financial and investment strategies) can influence value creation. Karlson reveals how all of this can be used to build or modify a successful business plan.

To reinforce the information presented, Corporate Value Creation includes a case study at the end of each chapter. A set of exercises with solutions for each chapter is also available to enable the reader to systematically review the material.

About the Author

Lawrence C. Karlson's successful business career has spanned over 50 years and has included everything from designing control systems for customers to running businesses in diverse countries such as Australia, Sweden, and the United States, and sitting on the Boards of Fortune 500 companies.