Value is a subject everyone talks about, but few know how to create Value well for themselves and their ecosystem. Value creation is an imperative for people to succeed.
The book describes Value Imperative (VI) that encompasses human endeavor and happiness. The book goes beyond just Value creation1 to helping you (and businesses) understand and realize the Value potential in you, others, and objects around you, and become a winner. VI mirrors real world and life.
This book is about becoming more valuable (prosperous, more successful and become a better executive, manager, and leader; a better person and a better human).
Creating Value creates leaders and successful people. These people are recognized as Value creators as they move upward in the corporate (and governmental and non-governmental) ladder or in the political system.
Carl Jung stated, “Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life, and you will call it fate.”
Individuals concentrate on either the goal (as in the case of a CEO seeking higher returns for his business), just doing their job, just being functional, or just working mechanically, without understanding what a powerful notion Value creation is or could be for you and your business and society.
Schools including business schools teach us (and businesses expect us) to be good efficient administrators doing an productive job (defined by the company or the school), but do not teach us to be Value creators, create Value as a goal, create Value consciously, and destroy less Value.
Therefore, we have to understand what Value means. Value is doing something that is good, worthwhile, or more importantly what others consider worthwhile.
Value creation is executing proactive, conscious, inspired, or imaginative and even normal actions that increase the overall good and well-being, and the worth of ideas, goods, services, people, or institutions including society, and all stakeholders (like employees, customers, partners, shareholders, and society), and ideas waiting to happen.
That is why our parents teach us to be good kids and to do good. But this is soon overtaken by the goal of making a living, of being successful.2
VI is a way of thinking that makes Value dominant in your daily life and in making a new future for you.
Join me in this interesting journey about yourself. Discover yourself and your Value potential, create more Value for yourself and others, and find how this creates greater Value for you. See how it changes your life into positiveness, significant success, and creates Value.
We want schools, colleges, and innovators to think of themselves as Value creators and incorporate Value creation thinking into their curriculum and their students. Think of a Bachelor’s or Master’s in Value Creation degree. We want businesses, society, and government leaders and politicians to think of Value creation not only for themselves but also for others and their nations.
Wayne Visser of Antwerp Management School wrote:
Value creation is so fundamental to our human belief systems that we intuitively feel that it is a worthy, if not an imperative goal, whether in our personal and family lives, our careers and institutions, or our communities and societies... Creating something worthwhile or better—something of Value—is the professed, if not the actual aspiration of almost everyone.
In fact Value creation is the goal of most dominant logics.
Values are different from the Value we discussed earlier, and Values create Value. Values are the moral and ethical thinking that forms the culture of a company and our own beliefs.
We wish to impact educational institutes and start Value Creation Centers. These will help members research and build Value. It might lead to more Chief Value Creation Officers to encompass Chief Happiness Officers, Chief Customer Officers, Chief Operating Officers, and the like.
This book only supplements Service Dominant and other dominant logic teachings. Business people do not focus on these dominant logics but talk about Value, hence the Value Imperative.
This Book
The book covers different aspects of Value, and how they impact you, business, society, technology, innovation and creativity, education; and when and where it exists, how it can be increased, how it is destroyed, and dissipated, and how it can reemerge. We have given enough references for readers who wish to get greater details.
The book includes the Principles of Value Creation, and as a subset, the Principles of Customer Value Creation. The book also describes the 6A’s required of successful executives. This book will make Value thinking a mindset. Sometimes Value Imperative is called Value Dominant Logic, which is also the subject of a larger, more comprehensive book to be published some time later.
1 Value creation includes co-creation.
2 Mahajan, G. 2016. Value Creation. Sage.