By Senior Contributor,Steve Denning

Copyright forbes

Hermès CEO Axel Dumas with Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, and Dame Anna Wintour at the AW23 Women’s Runway Show 2023 in Paris, France.
Dave Benett/Getty Images for Hermès

Who knew that Hermès, the French luxury company, is growing as fast as the U.S. retailer Walmart? Who would guess that ASML, the Dutch semiconductor firm, adds value as rapidly as Microsoft? Financial news, often opaque and fragmented, obscures such insights.

Navigating management without clear visuals is like traveling without a map. Lists of instructions help. Tables of distances add details. Narratives of past journeys inspire. Summaries of destinations intrigue. Rankings and bar charts prompt ideas. But without a single image picturing the overall terrain—its options, risks, and opportunities—grasping the full landscape remains challenging.

In retrospect, early maps of Earth and the Cosmos embarrass us. Our forebears misunderstood humanity’s place. “The world” was little more than Mediterranean lands, and “the Cosmos” consisted of our tiny planet, with the universe peripheral, if depicted at all.

The Lack Of Maps In Management Today

Management today faces similar limitations: We lack maps that clarify and simplify its vast terrain in single, comprehensible images. Groundwork exists, but challenges persist:

Management involves complex phenomena with countless dimensions and interactions.

Short-term pressures dominate, obscuring long-term trends.

Vested interests portray views favorably.

Non-public companies often lack accurate data.

Two Key Issues For Producing A Useful Map

Creating a useful map requires two decisions.

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The Single Most Important Measure Of Performance: The 10-Year TSR. Using 10-year total shareholder return (TSR) compared with the S&P 500 on the Y-axis is key because:

It’s fact, not opinion.

Several studies (below) already use it.

It draws on audited data.

It reflects customer and shareholder interests by measuring sustained growth.

High-TSR firms often show 20-30% better employee engagement (Gallup ).

Key Factors In Performance: The Value Creating Principles. Mapping TSR against three value-creating principles—prioritizing customer value over short-term profits, autonomous networks over hierarchies, and adaptive mindsets over mechanistic processes—reveals sustained differences.

These principles stem from extensive business/academic research.

They build on Peter Drucker’s 1954 insight: “There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer” (The Practice of Management, p. 36:).

They include an ethical dimension, akin to “love your neighbor as yourself”.

Verified company-by-company in U.S./Europe; Asia work ongoing.

High-principle firms cluster above S&P average, suggesting 20-30% TSR uplift.

Correlations are moderately positive (r~0.5-0.6), indicating trends but not guarantees.

These maps are a starting point—others should refine them, perhaps with alternative metrics.

Two Maps of Management In Europe And The U.S.

Figure 1: The 10-year total returns of 32 leading European stocks mapped against the three Value Creating Principles
Steve Denning

Figure 2: The 10-year total return of the 30 firms in the Dow Jones Industrial Index mapped against the three Value Creating Principles
Steve Denning

The Maps Build On Important Ongoing Studies

Valuable foundations for this work exist, though they stop short of causal maps:

The Drucker Institute’s Top 250 ranks U.S. firms on holistic scores (e.g., innovation, social responsibility) via tables—no TSR-principles scatters.

BCG’s Value Creators uses 5-year TSR rankings with bar charts and some scatter plots of firms (e.g., vs. market cap)—but with a financial focus, no principles.

JUST Capital’s JUST 100 scores stakeholders via tables/bars; correlations note out-performance but lack TSR scatter plots.

The World Management Survey aggregates practices in histograms/heat maps—no firm-level TSR.

The maps offered here enable easy comparison both between individual firms and between European and U.S. firms overall. For instance, the maps indicate that U.S. firms are making bolder moves in terms of implementing the Value Creating Principles and yielding more high-performers, yet also exihibiting worse performers at the low end.

Conclusions

These maps visualize causal terrain for 62 leading U.S./European firms, building on the work of the Drucker Institute, BCG, JUST, and the WMS. They combine hard financials with principle-based causes, showing firm relations and economy fits. It’s a novel approach, revealing key patterns, showing firms with high-value-creating principles driving significant uplift.

In the maps, 32 STOXX Europe 50 firms (Figure 1) and 30 Dow Jones firms (Figure 2) plot 10-year TSR (Y-axis) against three Value Creation Principles with scores (1-5, X-axis). Scores derive from qualitative research; alternatives may differ. TSR limited to public firms, from Seeking Alpha; non-publics are untested. The current focus is U.S./Europe; work on Asia is ongoing. Correlations suggest links but not causation (Europe r≈0.57, p=0.0009; U.S. r≈0.55, p=0.0026; external factors may influence). Data: October 2025—firms evolve. Replication welcome.

Individual data: European: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2025/10/02/how-to-picture-and-understand-europes-stock-market-for-the-first-time/

U.S.: https://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2025/09/28/how-to-picture-and-understand-the-dow-for-the-first-time/

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