Strategy and Value: The Four Foundations That Drive Long-Term Performance

For 30 years, McKinsey's Valuation has taught leaders how to measure value. This book shows how to create it.

Strategy & Value: The Four Foundations That Drive Long-Term Performance is the executive's companion to Valuation. It’s a guide to the strategic decisions that promote exceptional, lasting value creation―from the firm that has advised more CEOs on strategy than any other.

Strategy should be getting better. Leaders have never had more frameworks, tools, and data to work with. Yet only one in five executives say their strategies would pass a rigorous test of quality, a 40 percent decline over 15 years. Meanwhile, the gap between economic profit winners and losers has been widening.

Why do some companies succeed while others lag behind? The winners focus on fundamentals that don’t change even when everything else does. This book distills those fundamentals into four foundations and shows how grounding strategy in them unlocks the bold, distinctive choices that build long-term value, even as artificial intelligence and geopolitics shake the business world. In this book, you’ll learn:

• Why most strategies fail the value test―and how to know whether yours will
• How to have the debates that matter: which businesses to own, what to acquire, what to divest, when to return cash
• How to lead through uncertainty―including how to apply timeless principles of value to AI
• How to make strategy an institutional discipline, not an annual event

Written for executives, board directors, founders, and investors, Strategy & Value is the book to read before your next big strategic decision―and to put in the hands of every leader coming up behind you.

When everything changes, the fundamentals don't.

TIM KOLLER is a partner emeritus at McKinsey who focuses on value creation across industries and geographies. Over 39 years at the firm, he built many of McKinsey’s value creation capabilities and is an author of all eight editions of Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies.

ANDY WEST is a senior partner at McKinsey and global coleader of its Strategy and Corporate Finance practice. In this role, he directs McKinsey’s strategic advisory work on corporate finance, value creation, and capital allocation for organizations across sectors and geographies worldwide.

WHITNEY ZIMMERMAN is McKinsey’s first distinguished expert in strategy. He leads its research and advisory on the capabilities of strategically effective organizations and on the role of the strategy leader. Before joining the firm, he spent nearly a decade in engineering and manufacturing.