Value is one of the most invoked and least precisely defined words in business. It can be defined with genuine rigor, measured directly rather than assumed, and priced according to what it actually delivers rather than what it costs to produce.

The Value Equation is a practitioner’s survey of the discipline behind creating, measuring, pricing, delivering, and capturing genuine customer value: the choice between shaping markets and following them, rigorous value measurement, value-based pricing, the service-profit chain, service quality diagnostics, the real limits of feature accumulation, the jobs customers actually hire products to do, finding genuinely new value, customer lifetime value, and the organizational conditions that sustain all of it over time.