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Founder and CEO, Greg Milano, of Fortuna Advisors interviews leading executives, board directors, investors and other experts to discover how they've helped Create More Value for stakeholders and shareholders alike through capital deployment and allocation, mergers and acquisitions, corporate culture, executive compensation, investor activism, ESG and emerging opportunities like artificial intelligence that could change everything.
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Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwaan Karame explore how an ownership culture fuels long-term shareholder returns in the final instalment of a five-part series on economic-profit-based value management. The discussion centers around an updated take on economic profit that shows a stronger relationship to shareholder returns, known as Residual Cash Earnings (RCE). By focusing on RCE, companies gain better insights into where value is created or destroyed, enabling smarter resource allocatio...
Expert in pricing strategy and value-based management, Patrick Furtaw, joins the podcast. Patrick shares insights from his background in strategy, corporate finance, and organizational change, explaining why pricing is one of the most powerful levers for driving shareholder value. The conversation covers common pitfalls such as overreliance on cost-plus pricing, insufficient executive ownership, and misaligned sales incentives, while highlighting solutions like value-based pricing, price real...
Valuation expert, author, and leader of McKinsey & Company’s strategy and corporate finance practice, Tim Koller, joins the podcast. Greg and Tim explore the critical drivers of long-term value creation, the risks of short-termism, and the essential role of CEOs and CFOs in overriding human and organizational bias to drive optimal corporate strategy. We cover the importance of granular resource allocation, organizational biases like inertia and groupthink, and the process-based discipline...
Most incentive plans fail to drive true value creation—they reward mediocrity, encourage short-term thinking, and reward sandbagging and gaming of the system. In the fourth instalment of a LinkedIn Live series, Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwan Karame share a better incentive compensation design using a modern take on economic profit: Residual Cash Earnings. We cover why traditional bonus plans fall short, the key traits of an ownership culture, and how true value-based incentives align...
Consider a hypothetical company in 2012 with two business units—Amazon and Walmart. Our latest episode considers the question: which business would you rather own and prioritize reinvestment in? Traditional financial metrics would have made Walmart look like the obvious winner—profitable, disciplined, and cash-rich. But what happens if you use a modern economic-profit lens to value these disparate business models? This thought experiment explains why so many high-growth, high-potential busine...
This podcast features the third installment of our LinkedIn Live series on how economic profit drives long-term value creation. Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwaan Karame discuss strategic resource allocation: how companies can better allocate capital and other resources to unlock more shareholder value. They explore common pitfalls like erroneous objectives, lack of focus, and decision paralysis that lead firms to invest in value-destroying projects while underinvesting in their best gr...
Dan Sansone, former CFO of Vulcan Materials Company, joins the podcast to share how EVA focused forecasting, planning, and incentives on a singular goal of value creation. Drawing on nearly three decades at Vulcan and as a board member, the conversation covers why traditional lookbacks often stifle investment, why rolling targets and economic profit improve accountability, and the importance of designing consistent, transparent incentives that foster an ownership mindset. This episode can hel...
This podcast features the second installment of our LinkedIn Live series on how economic profit drives long-term value creation. Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwaan Karame discuss how Residual Cash Earnings (RCE) improves upon earlier economic profit models—most notably EVA. Greg shares how his experience with EVA, and later with Credit Suisse’s HOLT framework, led him to identify a key flaw: depreciation was distorting performance, encouraging companies to “sweat assets” and underinvest...
Valuation virtuoso, Michael Mauboussin, joins us to explore the core drivers of long-term value creation. We explore how valuation multiples are often misleading, why the rise of intangible assets requires new valuation frameworks, and how investors and corporate managers alike can better evaluate strategy and competitive advantage. We cover practical frameworks on capital allocation, sustainable competitive advantage, and why truly understanding economic fundamentals is key to avoiding “valu...
Joe Milam, founder of AngelSpan and The Legacy Funds, joins the podcast to discuss how behavioral finance principles improve decision-making for corporate managers and investors alike. Milam critiques the current chaotic, informal funding environment for startups and introduces his Venture TAMP platform, which applies disciplined public-market strategies—like the Kelly Criterion and standardized reporting—to early-stage investing. He emphasizes reducing bias, improving transparency, and optim...
Fortuna partners Greg Milano and Marwaan Karame highlight how economic profit (EP) drives superior decision-making, cultural alignment, and, ultimately, value creation. Unlike traditional metrics like ROIC or EBITDA margin, EP reflects the true value a company creates—profit earned above the cost of capital. Their research shows that companies embedding EP into planning, decision-making, and incentives outperform the market by 7% annually. Real-world examples, such as Kimball Electronics and ...
“From the shop floor to the top floor,” Kimball Electronics employees are laser-focused on economic profit. Kimball CFO, Jana Croom, discusses the transformative impact of the measure on business performance and how it aligns the team on a shared goal of value creation. Jana explains how economic profit provides a comprehensive view of financial health and aligns decision-making and strategy across all levels of the organization. We cover Kimball’s use of EVA in planning, compensation, ...
CEO, Ryan Barker, and Chief Strategy Officer, Ken Favaro, of BERA Brand Management explore how brand management strategies intersect with activist investor pressures. They discuss how Bera’s AI-powered platform equips businesses with real-time, predictive brand data that connects brand equity directly to financial outcomes. Using examples like Heinz and Barbie, the conversation highlights how companies can defend and optimize brand investments—especially under activist scrutiny. The takeaway?...
AnnaMaria shares insights from her leadership roles in some of the most significant mergers and transformations in recent history—including Pfizer-Wyeth and DowDuPont, and XPO Logistics. She discusses how strong leadership, clear communication, and a robust value creation thesis are critical for successful mergers. The conversation also explores the evolving role of communications in driving growth, managing risk, and building reputation as a core business asset. AnnaMaria DeSalva is also a s...
Greg Milano discusses how annual incentives can drive better corporate behavior. He highlights common flaws in traditional incentive plans, such as incomplete metrics, the time-consuming and counterproductive negotiation and gaming of targets, and ineffective payout structures. Milano advocates for a value-management approach using a cash-based measure of economic profit that reliably reflects shareholder value creation. Milano’s preferred economic profit measure, Residual Cash Earnings (RCE)...
Dave Peacock, CEO of Advantage Solutions, discusses the bold transformation he is leading to create more value at Advantage—turning a fragmented business into a focused provider of solutions that improve the velocity of commerce, helping brands get the right products on the right shelves and helping retailers more efficiently convert shoppers to buyers. Facing structural changes and secular challenges, we discuss lessons learned in his three decades of experience, including his tenure as Pres...
Dr. Alise Cortez, organizational psychologist and founder of Gusto Now!, explores how companies can instill meaning and purpose in their cultures to drive engagement, innovation, and profitability. Dr. Cortez shares practical strategies for measuring purpose, fostering a “culture of gusto,” and transforming businesses into “destination workplaces” that attract and retain top talent. Alise and our host Greg Milano highlight research showing the returns on purpose along with case studies on com...
Dennis Kubaile, co-founder of Granulytix, joins Greg to discuss how their groundbreaking platform enables granular economic profit analysis across complex portfolios on an ongoing basis. From segments to customers, geographies, channels and SKUs, Granulytix has proven to be immensely useful to understand where value is being created—and to pinpoint the best investment and improvement opportunities in real time, which enables an agile approach to strategy and resource allocation. Dennis shares...
Caterpillar Inc., the world’s leading construction equipment manufacturer, delivered over 2.5x the cumulative total shareholder return of the S&P 500 over the last eight years. In this episode, Caterpillar CFO Andrew Bonfield discusses how value-based management enables their dominant financial performance. At the heart of Caterpillar’s strategy is a focus on “profitable growth,” guided by a measure they call operating profit after capital charge (OPACC). OPACC is an economic profit measu...
Our conversation with David Berkowitz, founder and CIO of Value Aligned Partners, covers investment strategies that focus on long-term value creators. Greg and David discuss the inefficiencies of the “earnings game,” aligning management incentives with shareholder interests, and how to identify high-quality companies with sustainable competitive advantages. Berkowitz outlines three investment strategies: ownership companies with strong incentive structures, “cannibal” companies with high shar...
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