Rating: 
Summary: Relatively little new or noteworthy
Review: Many of the concepts in this book have been described and used by successful investors such as Graham in the 30s, Buffett's adaptation of Graham's ideas in the 70s and 80s, and the more recent breed of Intrinsic Value-driven investors who garner wide respect today. New terms are introduced with great fanfare when they often are simple rearrangements of well-known formulas (taking the inverse of a ratio somehow gives you a radically new insight?). It seemed to me that the major contribution of the author is a new set of acronyms.Claims about how failing companies turned around into successes because they adopted EVA are not sufficiently supported. Those turnarounds could have happened for any of many other reasons. The claims would be believable if they were well supported with facts and deeper analysis. As they are, they detract from the overall quality of the book and raise questions about other claims made in it. At times the author's tone is condescending, as if we can all assume his statements don't need proof!! The book could function as a fair reference but as most other reviewers have noted, there is no index, and the table of contents is about half a page! This is particularly difficult because the discussions of important concepts are somewhat spread about in the book. On the positive side, the author's focus on return on capital is good and the reasoning well stated and easy to understand. By the same token, his discussions of what provides true value to the investor (and business manager) is good. But these are not very original. Either the book should have been about one-fourth as long, or the examples the author used to justify EVA should have been much more thoroughly developed.
Rating: 
Summary: 780 PAGES & NO INDEX ...AARRRGGHH!
Review: My rating refers only to the one aspect mentioned in the title. A technical reference like this without an index is like a car without a steering wheel.
Rating: 
Summary: Interesting, well-written and useful but.....
Review: Stewart has crafted an engaging treatment of Economic Value Added (EVA) which is accessible to both financial professionals and "lay-investors" alike. The material is highly readable and the case examples serve well to illustrate important concepts. (One criticism: Stewart should receive 40 lashes with a wet noodle for failing to provide an index in an 800 page quasi-academic book). EVA was Stewart's contribution (in 1991) to the Shareholder Value framework originally introduced by Alfred Rappaport of Northwestern University. This theoretical framework emphasizes the imperative of adding shareholder value via the undertaking of specific financial and investment decisions at the corporate level and measuring that value with a metric similar to discounted cash flow analysis. EVA is Stern-Stewart's metric. After reading the Motley Fools rave review above, I would issue one caveat to all of those "fools" who think they have found the holy grail to selecting winning stocks: EVA has been around for a long time (the theoretical work precedes THE QUEST FOR VALUE by decades) and is well-integrated into investment management methodologies. There have been several studies which demonstrate that selecting stocks based on EVA or even changes in EVA will not produce excessive returns for investors (See Damodaran). Thus, the real "value" of THE QUEST FOR VALUE for private investors is to focus attention on the importance of economic measures of value and to point out the limitations of accounting valuation measures like earnings and earnings growth.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, well-written and useful but.....
Review: Stewart has crafted an engaging treatment of Economic Value Added (EVA) which is accessible to both financial professionals and "lay-investors" alike. The material is highly readable and the case examples serve well to illustrate important concepts. (One criticism: Stewart should receive 40 lashes with a wet noodle for failing to provide an index in an 800 page quasi-academic book). EVA was Stewart's contribution (in 1991) to the Shareholder Value framework originally introduced by Alfred Rappaport of Northwestern University. This theoretical framework emphasizes the imperative of adding shareholder value via the undertaking of specific financial and investment decisions at the corporate level and measuring that value with a metric similar to discounted cash flow analysis. EVA is Stern-Stewart's metric. After reading the Motley Fools rave review above, I would issue one caveat to all of those "fools" who think they have found the holy grail to selecting winning stocks: EVA has been around for a long time (the theoretical work precedes THE QUEST FOR VALUE by decades) and is well-integrated into investment management methodologies. There have been several studies which demonstrate that selecting stocks based on EVA or even changes in EVA will not produce excessive returns for investors (See Damodaran). Thus, the real "value" of THE QUEST FOR VALUE for private investors is to focus attention on the importance of economic measures of value and to point out the limitations of accounting valuation measures like earnings and earnings growth.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, well-written and useful but.....
Review: Stewart has crafted an engaging treatment of Economic Value Added (EVA) which is accessible to both financial professionals and "lay-investors" alike. The material is highly readable and the case examples serve well to illustrate important concepts. (One criticism: Stewart should receive 40 lashes with a wet noodle for failing to provide an index in an 800 page quasi-academic book). EVA was Stewart's contribution (in 1991) to the Shareholder Value framework originally introduced by Alfred Rappaport of Northwestern University. This theoretical framework emphasizes the imperative of adding shareholder value via the undertaking of specific financial and investment decisions at the corporate level and measuring that value with a metric similar to discounted cash flow analysis. EVA is Stern-Stewart's metric. After reading the Motley Fools rave review above, I would issue one caveat to all of those "fools" who think they have found the holy grail to selecting winning stocks: EVA has been around for a long time (the theoretical work precedes THE QUEST FOR VALUE by decades) and is well-integrated into investment management methodologies. There have been several studies which demonstrate that selecting stocks based on EVA or even changes in EVA will not produce excessive returns for investors (See Damodaran). Thus, the real "value" of THE QUEST FOR VALUE for private investors is to focus attention on the importance of economic measures of value and to point out the limitations of accounting valuation measures like earnings and earnings growth.
Rating:
Summary: A Classic
Review: The Quest for Value is a classic work describing the many facets of what creates shareholder value. The first two chapters describing market myths and market realities lay down a basic framework for the rest of the book on the creation of shareholder value. The best topics in the book cover dividend policy, mergers and acquisitions, capital structure, and compensation incentives. In addition, the book spends considerable time explaining the concept of Economic Value Added (EVA). I find these sections of the book less valuable as the examples of how to calculate EVA are extremely simplified. In practice, it is much more difficult to calculate EVA and I find the traditional DCF approach much easier to deal with. Overall, the well written and communicated sections on the creation of shareholder value more than compensates for the weak treatment of calculating EVA. As such, I would recommend this book to any serious student or practitioner of finance.
Rating: 
Summary: The best modern financial text available today.
Review: The Quest for Value is the best modern financial text available today and certainly the best written since Benjamin Graham's Security Analysis. I teach the Quest for Value to graduate students at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis and manage FalkerInvestments, an investment firm specializing in EVA investments. The Quest for Value is our financial bible. A few tips in reading this excellent book. Read the Preface by Joel Stern and Chapter 1, the introduction; then skip to Chapter 12 which deals with the best discussion of the concepts of cost of capital available today. Then read chapters 2 and 3 and select the following chapters based on what interests you. This book appeals to business readers at all levels, so those with less experience should not get bogged down in some of the more sophisticated areas of the book. In other words, it can be read selectively for content.
Rating:
Summary: A Holy-Priced Book, Though Not Valuation's Holy Grail
Review: This book brings emphasis to the importance of Return on Invested Capital as a valuation metric in security analysis, although the author purports to substantially refine and expand on your prosaic understanding of this concept. It is an ambitious work that has a couple of inexplicable shortcomings, given its length, price, and its author's flair for pointing out the flaws in other valuation methods. The author makes no effort to apply his valuation methods to financial service companies (EVA is applicable to these kinds of companies, but you have to attend an EVA seminar to learn how to do that). There is no index! And there is little empirical data by researchers --outside the cult of EVA, at least-- to support some of Stewart's rather bold claims about this being a better metric for predicting stock price advancements than earnings, free cash flow, return on equity, etc. And then there is the matter of EVA (tm) itself. Given the scarcity of objective data to support EVA as THE metric which best calibrates and predicts advancing/declining security market valuations, who really needs to embrace a somewhat complicated proprietary formula and worry about trademark infringement? For decades, Warren Buffett got by with crude, freebie valuation concepts such as return on equity, return on assets, the non-trademarked version of return on invested capital, and free cash flow. These ratios are as wonderfully easy to calculate in aggregate as EVA is hard to calculate, and the EVA enthusiast's faith that the latter proprietary concept is somehow better than the former freebie ones seems silly --although it does make for a lot of extra work (securing the future for the trademark owners, who have made a lucrative career of this stuff).
Rating:
Summary: Best guidance for practical use of 'EVA',the great concept.
Review: This book is a best guidance for understanding, caculating and making practical use of the EVA concept.
It has been recognized as a great work which emphasize the importance of the shareholder value and open a new era in business decision making process.
The author has not only concrete theoretical backgrounds but also many experiences in corporate practice.
As a corporate financial staff, I got an amazing impact from this excellent book.
Rating:
Summary: Very Useful, Conceptualy perfect
Review: This book takes you step by step through the direct link between corporate performance and valuation, Clearly explained, with no equivacation or fuzzy thinking. Applicable in real world settings. This is the standard to judge the others by. I have no afilliation or interest in this book or its success.
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