Center for Advancing Corporate Performance

Bridging the Gap

The Center for Advancing Corporate Performance (CACP) supports innovative, collaborative research aimed at understanding the linkages between management of human capital, governance policies, and firm economic and financial performance. The CACP serves as a “hub” for collaboration between senior business executives, corporate partners, and academics, including faculty and graduate students from the Illinois Institute of Technology’s Stuart School of Business and other areas of the university.

CACP's goal is to produce research that is intellectually rigorous and that “bridges the gap” between academic researchers, senior business executives, and their boards of directors.

Groundbreaking Work by CACP Executive Board Members

Risk-Taking in the Pursuit of Value Creation

CACP Executive Board Members Bartley J. Madden and David R. Koenig have launched groundbreaking books on the role of knowledge-building and risk-taking governance to drive value creation.

Value Creation Principles

Bartley J. Madden’s new book, Value Creation Principles: The Pragmatic Theory of the Firm Begins with Purpose and Ends with Sustainable Capitalism, promotes knowledge-building proficiency as the fundamental determinant of a firm’s long-term performance. Knowledge building and value creation are opposite sides of the same coin.

The Pragmatic Theory of the Firm explained in this book uses a life-cycle framework that connects a firm’s financial performance to its market valuation and long-term shareholder returns. Throughout this book, life-cycle track records for game-changing firms are displayed that not only provide a visual, intuitive explanation of how the stock market works, but also capture the uniquely important role of intangible assets that dominate value creation in the New Economy.

The Board Member’s Guide to Risk

David R. Koenig has just written his second book, called The Board Member’s Guide to Risk. Designed to be a practical guidebook for board members and senior executives to both talk about and take risk more confidently, the book also serves as a helpful framework for advanced M.B.A. students—guiding them to understand both the necessity of risk-taking in the pursuit of value creation as well as the best structures to govern those pursuits.

Koenig’s first book, Governance Reimagined: Organizational Design, Risk, and Value Creation, looks at some of the same problems as Madden does in Value Creation Principles, but from a slightly different perspective. The two books are highly complementary and will give readers new perspectives on how firms work and why people come together in organizations.