The Value Sphere

This book, written in story narrative form, traces the development of a company from a start-up to a global enterprise. It develops the key concepts related to this evolution — corporate strategy, raising external finance, capital budgeting, dividend policy, mergers and acquisition, globalization, marketing and human resource management. The focus is on topics in corporate strategy and corporate finance, and each topic is developed in depth with problem sets and reflection questions within the context of the organization's evolution.

The Power Point slides, practice problems and solutions, as well as intervention exercises for executive education teaching is available upon request for all instructors who adopt this book as a course text. Please send your request to sales@wspc.com.

Contents:

• The Firm and the Value Sphere: How Do We Maximize the Creation and Retention of Value?
• Time for Action: Jerry Says Hello to Finance and Takes the Plunge
• Business Growth, External Financing, and IPOs: Jerry is Introduced to the “One for Me, None for You” Slogan
• Jerry Says Hello to His New Shareholders: Agency Costs and Corporate Governance
• Why Firms Fail to Maximize Shareholder Value: How Value Evaporates
• The Source of Value: Strategy
• Risk and Value: Why Should Jerry Care?
• What Do Our Investments Really Cost Us?: The Cost of Capital
• How to Know Which Projects are Good: Project Selection Criteria
• More on Economic Profit
• Performance Measures: Jerry is Introduced to the “Acronym Wars”
• A New Financial Management System Using Shareholder Value
• Designing a World-Class Resource Allocation Process
• What to do When NPV Fails: A Real Options Approach to Project Selection
• Comprehensive Resource Allocation: A Training Seminar
• Jerry Has a New Problem: How to Use a Portfolio Approach to Project Selection
• Dividends: Jerry Contemplates a Payout
• Capital Structure: Jerry Wonders How much Debt to Use
• Acquiring a Firm
• Resource Allocation for Non-Traditional Projects
• Post-Acquisition Integration Issues
• Jerry Wrestles with Corporate Governance
• Jerry Reconsiders Executive Compensation
• Managing in Tough Times versus Innovating
• Corporate Culture: Bringing Everything Together

Readership: Academics teaching and studying organizational behavior, corporate governance, managers, CEOs and CFOs.
Key Features:

• Introduces advanced topics in corporate strategy and corporate finance in an engaging way, woven into a story
• Covers all the Key Corporate Finance concepts in a very accessible manner
• Integrates all of the concepts and topics in the book within the unifying concept of the “Value Sphere”
• Contains numerous real-world examples as well as practice problem sets and end-of-chapter reflection exercises that can be used to initiate organizational change interventions