You'd like to tone up, get really healthy. Buff even. So why haven't you done it? It isn’t as if you don’t know how to get in shape. You know very well how to do it. But knowing isn’t enough: You also have to do it. Every day.

The same goes for creating value in your company. You know what makes your company valuable. You also know what you must do to enhance its value: increase revenues, control costs and improve your key capabilities. And that’s great: Knowing those things is important. But it isn’t enough.

In fact, in a recent survey of 124 financial executives*, only 21 percent said they encouraged value-creating behaviors. That means there's probably plenty of room for improvement at your company.

Are you inhibiting value? Ask yourself:

1. Do you expect your people to figure out for themselves how to translate your vision and broad strategies into concrete projects that enhance value?
2. Do you wait for value-creating opportunities to turn up?
3. Do you let powerful personalities drive your choice of projects?
4. Do you talk about cost cutting when what you really want is bigger profits?
5. Are you alienating key stakeholders (customers? employees?) by suggesting other stakeholders (shareholders?) are more important?
6. Do you have everybody so focused on boosting short-term earnings that they lose sight of the long term?
7. Is it possible that your compensation system rewards individual achievement at the expense of enterprise value?
8. Do you hold so many people responsible for creating value that nobody’s really focusing on it?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, you may be undermining your company’s value. Subscribe now to receive complimentary future editions of our new monthly newsletter, The Value Habit, and you'll receive practical strategies, tools and techniques to help you establish value-creating behaviors instead. And, we’ll offer real-world examples of enhanced value created by using these very techniques.

Best of all, you’ll be able to convert what you already know about value into steps that will build value in your own company, helping you get the value habit.

*Deloitte Dbriefs Webcast, "Driving Enterprise Value," October 14, 2004.

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