Abstract

This article confronts the perennial question in our professional community: Is business valuation art, or is it science? The view taken here is that it is neither. Just as surely as masonry, surgery, and woodworking, it is craft. Using medicine as a foil, the paper explains why valuation is craft, discusses the dysfunctional reward systems in place for those in charge of membership organizations, recalls the political responses to the savings-and-loan rip-off of the 1980s and to the accounting scandals that led off this new century, and ends by proposing six steps that membership organizations should take to elevate what is rapidly becoming a mail-order credential to the rarefied status of craft.