Cracking the code on capital expenditure managementĭespite the importance of capital expenditure management in executing business strategy, preserving cash, and maximizing ROIC, most companies struggle in this area for two primary reasons. This dynamic reinforces the age-old challenge for executives as they carefully allocate marginal dollars toward value creation.Ĭompanies can improve their odds of success by focusing on areas of the project life cycle- capital strategy and portfolio optimization, project development and value improvement, and project delivery and construction-while investing in foundational enablers. In addition, ill-considered cuts to key projects in a portfolio may actually jeopardize future operating performance and outcomes.

Yet managing capital projects is complex, and many organizations struggle to extract cost savings. In our experience, organizations that focus on actions across the whole project life cycle, the capital project portfolio, and the necessary foundational enablers can reduce project costs and timelines by up to 30 percent to increase ROIC by 2 to 4 percent. This provocative book paints a troubling portrait of the pervasive global nature of the code, the people who shape it, and the governments that enforce it.This strategy is even more vital in competitive markets, where ROIC is perilously close to cost of capital.

Pistor describes how they pick and choose among different legal systems and legal devices for the ones that best serve their clients’ needs, and how techniques that were first perfected centuries ago to code landholdings as capital are being used today to code stocks, bonds, ideas, and even expectations–assets that exist only in law.Ī powerful new way of thinking about one of the most pernicious problems of our time, The Code of Capital explores the different ways that debt, complex financial products, and other assets are coded to give financial advantage to their holders.

With the right legal coding, any object, claim, or idea can be turned into capital–and lawyers are the keepers of the code. In this revealing book, Katharina Pistor argues that the law selectively “codes” certain assets, endowing them with the capacity to protect and produce private wealth. What is it, exactly, that transforms mere wealth into an asset that automatically creates more wealth? The Code of Capital explains how capital is created behind closed doors in the offices of private attorneys, and why this little-known fact is one of the biggest reasons for the widening wealth gap between the holders of capital and everybody else. The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.Ī compelling explanation of how the law shapes the distribution of wealth.Ĭapital is the defining feature of modern economies, yet most people have no idea where it actually comes from.

Pistor the code of capital