Joel M. Stern elaborates on the causes of the economic meltdown and financial banking crisis, occurring nowadays. He shows, through different diagrams, how banks have designed their incentives and why most of them have failed. Stern explains what the economic value added program, EVA, is and encourages its implementation in all kinds of companies, in order to successfully maximize their value, as he describes the possible behaviors resulting from its application by using several cases to illustrate it. He answers many inquiries on the subject and details the properties and conditions needed to apply EVA, such as simplicity, significance, definitiveness, objectivity, among others.