Why Value is Misunderstood Across Organizations

Value means different things depending on where you sit in an organization.

For the board, value is measurable: it’s the sum of better decisions that drive growth, optimize capital, and manage risk. It’s not dashboards, platforms, or AI models, it’s the impact those tools have on cost, revenue, and risk outcomes.

For the CEO, value is action. It’s about executing strategy with confidence, allocating resources where they create the most leverage, improving revenue, reducing unnecessary spend, and anticipating risks before they materialize. If the board’s expectations of value aren’t clear, the CEO is forced to chase outputs instead of outcomes.

For operational teams — finance, HR, business operations, data, technology, and beyond, value is often hidden in activity. Hours spent building reports, running models, maintaining systems, or optimizing processes feel productive, but they only create measurable impact if they directly improve decisions that affect costs, revenue, or risk exposure. Without line-of-sight to those decisions, even high-quality work can feel disconnected from real business outcomes.

The gap between activity and value is where most organizations fail. Investments in data, AI, process improvements, or technology upgrades often become measures of sophistication, not instruments of impact. Boards see spend, CEOs see effort, and operational teams see technical achievement, but nobody sees improved decisions affecting the bottom line, top line, or risk profile.

Here’s the simple rule: value is created when every investment, insight, and initiative has a clear line to a decision that drives measurable enterprise outcomes: cost savings, revenue growth, or risk reduction.

Boards should ask: Which decisions matter most, and how will we know if they are improving cost, revenue, or risk outcomes?

CEOs should ask: Are my teams focused on decisions that create measurable value or just outputs?

Operational teams should ask: How does my work tangibly improve a choice that matters across finance, HR, operations, data, and technology?

If everyone in the organization can answer these questions, value becomes visible, measurable, and repeatable.

That is how data, AI, and operational excellence move from being a cost center to a strategic lever that directly impacts enterprise outcomes.