Create More Value

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 optimizing capital allocation to support innovation. The conversation spans topics like barriers to corporate innovation, portfolio theory, and how data-driven decision-making often outperforms human intuition in venture and public markets alike.

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 Varian Medical Systems, illustrate how adopting EP can trigger profitable growth, foster an ownership mindset, and lead to better capital allocation and portfolio optimization decisions. EP encourages better behaviors like smart spending and risk-taking, focused prioritization, and long-term thinking. 

“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, and operational execution, including practical examples like inventory management and capital investment. Jana also shares insights on navigating market volatility, balancing capital efficiency, and why it’s important for CFOs to lead well beyond the finance department. This episode offers valuable takeaways for finance leaders and executives seeking to sharpen their team’s strategic focus and embrace a value-oriented ownership culture.

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? Treat brand as an asset, measure it with financial rigor, and use data to drive ROI, relevance, and pricing power in a competitive landscape.

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 seasoned leader in strategic communications and corporate transformation. From 2017 – 2024, DeSalva served on the board of XPO Logistics, becoming Vice Chairman in 2019, and played a key role in board engagement, strategy, CEO succession, and governance during XPO’s transformation. Currently, AnnaMaria is Global Chairman of the Burson Group, a leading communications firm focused on creating value through reputation. From 2019 to 2024, she was Global Chairman and CEO of Hill & Knowlton Strategies. Previously, she was Chief Communications Officer at DuPont and a senior advisor to DowDuPont CEO Ed Breen during the company’s historic split into independent public companies. Earlier in her career, she also held leadership roles at Pfizer, Bristol Myers Squibb, and GCI Group.

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), was developed to encourage profitable investment, reduce financial manipulation, and simplify incentive structures by measuring against the prior year rather than the plan. Complete measures like RCE not only restore sanity to planning and target-setting—they unite the team on a shared goal of value creation by helping management pinpoint its most promising strategy, capital allocation, and portfolio optimization opportunities, even across complex businesses. Indeed, research shows companies that use economic profit measures like RCE outperform the market by 7% annually, as they are able to target and sustain TSR improvement.  

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 President of Anheuser-Busch during its acquisition by InBev and working with 3G Capital to drive efficiency while preserving top-line results with brand investment and pricing power. He also shares how his early education in journalism and economics helped shape his perspective as a leader in evaluating and communicating the commercial opportunity ahead. 

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 companies successfully embedding purpose into their operations. They also consider how generational shifts are making workplace purpose increasingly essential.

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 real-world examples of businesses that drove profit growth by leveraging granular profit to uncover hidden inefficiencies, reallocate resources, and change the underlying business model. Greg and Dennis also explore the growing role of AI and Granulytix’s new agentic AI-powered solution for financial and strategic analysis, GranulytixIQ, and the impact this will have on both consultants and companies making data-driven investment decisions. Prior to founding Granulytix, Dennis spent over 20 years in strategy consulting developing value-based strategies for clients like Caterpillar, Abbott, and Boeing.

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 measure that allows Caterpillar to target operating improvements and strategically allocate resources across its complex portfolio, focusing on high-return opportunities while restructuring or exiting underperforming areas. For Caterpillar, growth and innovation are essential; a disciplined, fact-based approach helps them identify their very best investment and improvement prospects.