Critically Exploring Value Destruction to Create More Value

Abstract The purpose of this article is fourfold. The first is to get practitioners and academics understand the value of a value destruction focus. How can it improve value creation? This is a brand new area that has not hitherto received much attention. The second is to get practitioners to use this thinking more actively in building their strategy, operational thinking, compliance thought process and regulatory and political (environmental and external) thinking. The third is to open up a new area of research for academics who work on various subjects where value creation is a goal or is important. Perhaps they can analyse past failures and come up with recipes for greater value creation and a process for analysis before committing to a path of action or they can find better processes for looking at, designing, developing or monitoring strategy, new products and services, new technologies and new operational thinking. What new tools can be developed to analyse or mitigate value destruction or simply foresee these? This should also open a debate and papers in Journal of Creating Value and perhaps lead to a special issue. What techniques can be used to change managerial mind-sets. Finally and fourth, the aim is to get away from reactive and ‘after-the-fact’ analysis to proactive value creation and reduce value destruction and learn from value destruction potential