"What's the fastest way to boost cash flow? [It's as simple as] just neutralizing losses ... to do that, you need to know where the real losses are ..."
"Any investor would pay handsomely to know today where pools of market profit will be over next 20 years ... business leaders should create these insights too."
"Most businesses look at, and manage to, three-year time horizons. This is shockingly shortsighted! Just 15 percent of the value of the business (typically) is covered by the next three years’ cash flow ... It shouldn’t be controversial to assert that the key to maximizing business value is to manage to a time horizon where most of the value is!"
"Market strategy also has much greater scope to make large, discrete changes in the business and its economics than do all other areas of business strategy."
"GAAP-based measures of profit exclude swaths of costs and expenses, and are subject to the inappropriate charges of poor allocation methods and distorted accounting ..."
"It seems incredible that with so much invested in information technology, even in the smallest of businesses, management still does not have access to the most basic of business information: a value-oriented measure of profitability."
"This is where the accounting profession comes in for some considerable criticism. While they are doing a great job of accounting for the comings and goings of money in the business ... they are not giving business leaders information that [drives] cash flow."
"... businesses and their leaders must be evaluated based on their ability to deliver returns to investors. We are unequivocal in asserting this; it is the cornerstone of the insights, tips, and even philosophical outlook that you will read in this book."
"In fact, markets with the largest revenue opportunity usually do not offer the best long-term profit opportunity." "The key difference between managing incumbent businesses and creating (and managing) new business can be summarized in one word: failure. While failure is simply not acceptable in an incumbent business, it is a hard fact of life in new business creation ... It just needs to be properly managed."
"What can be said about organizational value-add is that, by definition, it always has a dollar value associated with it. The trick is to figure out where the sources are, and what their dollar value-adds are too."
