White Papers

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Working papers from Value Lattice. Each one is free to download and share with attribution. They are written to be checked: every load-bearing claim carries a numbered source, and corrections to any sourced claim are welcome.

Free to use and adapt. Everything on this page is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). You can use it, share it and change it for any purpose, including inside your own company. The one condition is credit: keep the attribution line naming The Value Standard and valuelattice.com, and say that you changed it if you did. Improvements are welcome.

The Request for Value

The one page procurement never asked for, where it goes in the process, and how to issue it Monday. 17 pages.

Procurement’s vocabulary has a request for information, a request for quotation, and a request for proposal. Each asks the supplier something. None makes the buyer’s own side write down what the purchase has to produce, how it will be measured, and what evidence will count, so the definition of success arrives from the vendor inside the proposal. The Request for Value is the missing step: one page the business owner writes before the market is asked, with five components (outcomes, metrics, conditions, evidence, comparison criteria), attached to the RFP, referenced by the contract, and tested at renewal.

The paper places the RFV in the procurement process, answers the incumbent’s objection, treats attribution as the hard part it is, and sets out how to issue the first one on one category and one decision. Appendix A is the page itself, as a form anyone may copy and use.

The Bracket

How economics set aside value in use, how the seller picked it up, and why the debt is now due. 31 pages.

Every purchase carries two numbers. One is what you paid. The other is what it did for you. The first is on the invoice. The second is not on anything. This paper traces that gap from Adam Smith’s decision in 1776 to set value in use aside, through the century in which business measurement grew up on price and cost, to the two decades in which enterprise software vendors built the only working apparatus for quantifying value in use that most buyers have encountered, and filed the resulting software category under Sales.

The author spent fifteen years building that apparatus. The paper makes the seller’s case at full strength, then shows where it breaks: every study cited for it measures the seller’s outcome, the reviews were run and never added up, and the vendors’ own figures put realized value at half to two thirds of what was projected. Since 2024, vendors have begun charging for outcomes they define and meter themselves, which makes the buyer’s missing instrument load-bearing for the first time.

Related: the buyer-issued instruments on the Instruments page, and The Value Standard, which sets out the buyer-held standard the paper argues for.