Book excerpt: 'Creating Value through Business Strategy' is the new edition of 'Creating Value: Shaping Tomorrow's Business', winner of the MCA price for best management in 1997. This new edition provides constructive guidelines to readers to open their minds to the challenges of creating value. It extends and updates the reasons for the choice of the individual offering as the strategy unit and intensifies and extends the challenges to standard approaches and conventional thinking. Updates to all the material from the first edition are included and new examples have been added throughout.