These ideas evolved from a long and eclectic research career and constitute a way of thinking that deserves consideration as part of a foundation for business education.

The most up-to-date reference for additional discussion of these ten ideas is My Value Creation Journey: An Autobiography of My Work, click here. Each idea below is explained in a short video which are best viewed in order.

My work can be put into two categories: knowledge building and finance. The most complete discussion of my finance work can be found in Value Creation Principles: The Pragmatic Theory of the Firm Begins with Purpose and Ends with Sustainable Capitalism. Click Here

If the reader is unfamiliar with my work, then a viewing of the videos is essential to understand the basic thinking behind these ten ideas listed below and my terminology, e.g., “Knowledge Building Loop” and “life-cycle track record.”

Click here to view the ten videos which are integrated into the Certificate in Value Creation online course offered by the Madden Center for Value Creation at Florida Atlantic University.

The following lists the ten (key ideas) takeaways shown at the end of each video:

#1 The Knowledge Building Loop emphasizes the role of past experiences in shaping our perceptions, which is consistent with how our brains evolved not to promote accuracy, but to promote survival.

#2 The Knowledge Building spotlights the advantage of past experiences in facilitating new useful connections and the disadvantage by blocking new ways of seeing what could be.

#3 Systems thinking represents the interconnectedness of the parts while focusing on relationships and emergent properties. Systems thinking promotes reframing problems in creative ways that are not possible with linear cause-and-effect thinking.

 #4 There is merit in considering the foundation for business education to be the process for building knowledge which is reflected in the Knowledge Building Loop. The Loop promotes systems thinking and identifying assumptions that are no longer relevant or simply obsolete. 

#5 Language has a pervasive influence in concealing assumptions while greatly simplifying the world—language is perception’s silent partner.

#6 Boards of directors and investors benefit from placing forecasts of future performance scenarios in the context of a firm’s, or a business unit’s, past life-cycle track record.

#7 The life-cycle framework provides insights about a firm’s history, identifies key value creation issues, illustrates how value creation is rooted in the long term, and suggests that business history studies would be far more useful if a firm’s long-term life-cycle track record was displayed.

#8 The key to sustainable value creation is a culture that is deeply rooted in the four-part purpose of the firm and in knowledge-building proficiency.

#9 The Pragmatic Theory of the Firm views the firm as a holistic system and positions maximizing shareholder value not as the purpose of the firm, but as the result of the firm successfully achieving its four-part purpose over the long term. 

#10 The New Economy accounting system begins inside the firm with an ongoing learning process for intangibles, experimentation with the capitalization and amortization of intangibles, and more accurate life-cycle track records thereby improving resource allocation decisions.