A company’s ability to quickly adapt to the changing demands and requirements of its customers has become an essential requirement for it’s long-term survival. Managers must not limit their thinking to ‘just’ the product or project’s value but more importantly what will make customers prefer their offerings to those presented by rivals. It’s about a ‘Result Focus’ aimed not simply at what is made and how much it will cost to manufacture but how it will be useful to those who buy it: it’s about exceeding the customer’s experience and so beating the competition.
This significant new book explains how rational thinking is key to leadership and competitive advantage. The author’s combine the theories of value engineering and knowledge management with leadership techniques to provide a methodology that will help you develop the technological advantages that will deliver desired results.
Achieving results: How to Create Value is not another book of tools and techniques for value engineering. Many such books already exist. Unfortunately, few of them explain the theories underlying the practice that they preach. Readers are expected to enter into a blind faith that accepts the ‘magic’ of value engineering without question or even evidence or understanding.
Achieving results: How to Create Value is a book that puts the value of science back into value engineering. It moves value engineering from being a low-tech art to a hi-tech methodology capable of being used by the likes of the Drug Discovery processes, NASA’s Mars mission and in charity work. The authors focus on the underlying theories that link leadership, value engineering and technology management. It argues that the practice of value engineering has hardly moved forward in the last 30 years because the underlying theories upon which practice is based have rarely been critically examined or explained and that the subjective models upon which practice is based have been promoted at the expense of objective models – this is what the authors seek to overthrow.
Achieving results: how to create value provides a new foundation for value engineering, and will help its many advocates to see it as a method that enables the improvement of artificial constructs, from artefacts to organizations. It will help you to become a leader and a value technologist who thinks not just of product or project value but also of how this value will bring improvement to your customers and shareholders.
Preface
Chapter 1 : Towards Value Leadership
Chapter 2 : The Context for Value Leadership
Chapter 3 : Towards Objective Value in Organizational Decision-Making
Chapter 4 : Structuring a Value Creation Programme in an Organization
Chapter 5 : Towards Technological Advantage with Value Engineering
Index
