The World Is Messy. Value Is Still Being Built.

By : Ardeshir Vosooghi

Turn on the news and you could be forgiven for believing the world has become one enormous dumpster fire with Wi-Fi.

Wars continue. Political alliances are shifting. Energy markets are being rattled. Artificial intelligence is rewriting entire professions before most of us have figured out what button we accidentally pushed. Governments are struggling with debt, migration, security and climate. Trust in institutions remains battered.

There is plenty to worry about.

But there is another story running underneath the headlines.

People are still building.

Businesses are changing hands. New valuation tools are being created. Professional standards are evolving. Countries that disagree on almost everything are still finding reasons to sit at the same table. Capital continues to move toward new technologies. And some of the very disruptions creating uncertainty are forcing institutions and businesses to become better, faster and more resilient.

That story deserves some airtime too.

What Is a Business Really Worth?

The latest developments in the business-valuation world revolve around a deceptively simple question:

Where does value actually live?

A recent Delaware Court of Chancery decision provides a fascinating example. In Gladstone v. EBC Holdings, the court confronted an unusual situation in which two companies owned significant stakes in one another. Rather than simply accepting the accounting treatment of that circular ownership, the court favored an economic waterfall designed to determine where the actual financial interests ultimately belonged.

In other words, accounting describes the structure.

Economics still has to describe the reality.

That distinction matters far beyond one Delaware courtroom.

We are increasingly entering an economy where traditional measurements do not always capture what makes an enterprise valuable.

Brands matter.

Data matters.

Intellectual property matters.

Systems matter.

Relationships matter.

And perhaps most importantly for anyone buying or selling a privately held company, transferability matters.

A profitable business that cannot function without its owner may be a wonderful job for that owner. It is not necessarily a wonderful investment for the next one.

A newly introduced Transferable Value Index attempts to quantify precisely this issue by examining business durability and owner independence. Early findings identified strategic direction as a significant weakness: even some otherwise highly transferable businesses still depended heavily on their owners to decide where the company went next.

That should get the attention of every small-business owner contemplating retirement.

The question isn't merely:

How much money does your business make?

It is:

How much of that value survives when you leave?

AI Is Coming for the Spreadsheet. Maybe Not the Judgment.

Then there is artificial intelligence.

For professionals in valuation, accounting, law, finance and brokerage, AI naturally creates some anxiety. Much of what professionals once spent hours doing—research, document review, preliminary analysis, comparable searches and financial organization—can increasingly be assisted or automated.

Kroll CEO Jacob Silverman recently offered an interesting counterpoint: as AI absorbs routine analytical work, sophisticated professional judgment may actually become more valuable, not less.

The commodity work gets cheaper.

The judgment gets more expensive.

That is an important distinction.

AI can calculate EBITDA.

It can normalize financial statements.

It can search thousands of transactions.

It can produce a remarkably respectable first-pass valuation.

But eventually somebody still has to ask:

Does this number make sense?

And then defend the answer when a buyer, seller, lender, attorney, tax authority or judge asks why.

Interestingly, valuation technology is simultaneously becoming more accessible. New benchmarking tools are allowing business owners to get preliminary indications of value while drawing from increasingly large transaction databases. FP Transitions, for example, has introduced an Estimated Value Index backed by experience from more than 17,000 valuations.

That does not eliminate professional valuation.

It changes where professional value begins.

The calculator is becoming cheap.

Wisdom remains stubbornly expensive.

The Same Transformation Is Happening Globally

Zoom out from individual businesses and something similar is occurring among nations.

The geopolitical environment in September 2026 is undeniably dangerous. The U.S.-Iran conflict has disrupted energy markets and the Strait of Hormuz, while Russia's war with Ukraine continues to consume lives and resources.

Yet diplomacy, battered though it may be, stubbornly refuses to die.

On September 3, Russian President Vladimir Putin publicly said there was a chance of reaching an agreement over Ukraine. Kyiv, meanwhile, described a "new dynamic" in diplomatic efforts, while countries including the United States, China and India continue pushing or offering support toward negotiations.

Those statements are nowhere near a peace treaty, and they should not be mistaken for one.

But people talking about how to end a war is better than people talking only about how to win one.

There are smaller signs of cooperation elsewhere.

At the G20 finance ministers' meeting this week, countries with profound political disagreements nevertheless found substantial common ground around increasing economic growth, dealing with sovereign debt, limiting international economic spillovers and addressing global imbalances.

The European Union has simultaneously reaffirmed its support for multilateral cooperation and the United Nations at a moment when international institutions are under tremendous pressure.

None of this makes the conflicts disappear.

It does remind us of something easily forgotten:

The international system is not composed solely of wars.

It is also composed of thousands of boring meetings where people prevent the next one.

Those meetings rarely lead the evening news.

Perhaps they should occasionally get a little credit.

Even an Energy Crisis Can Accelerate Change

The current Middle Eastern conflict has also exposed the vulnerability of an interconnected global energy system.

Closing or restricting one narrow waterway can ripple through factories, transportation networks and household budgets thousands of miles away.

But pressure creates adaptation.

The energy shock has pushed governments across Europe and Asia to accelerate renewable-energy development, particularly solar power. High petroleum prices are also strengthening the economics of electric vehicles in several major markets. The transition remains imperfect—some countries have increased coal consumption as a short-term response—but the strategic incentive to reduce dependence on imported fossil fuels has rarely been clearer.

Even geopolitical competition is occasionally producing tangible benefits.

Australia and the United States have pledged a combined $580 million toward Pacific Island nations, including funding related to energy resilience, fuel storage, grid stability and regional security. The geopolitical motivation is obvious: China is competing aggressively for influence across the Pacific.

Fine.

Countries do not suddenly become charitable organizations because somebody discovered enlightenment in a conference room.

But if geopolitical competition results in infrastructure, stronger electrical grids and investment reaching small island nations facing serious climate threats, the people living there may reasonably care more about the bridge than the motivation of whoever paid for it.

We Are Learning to Value Things We Could Barely Measure Before

Perhaps one of the most interesting developments in the valuation world is also one of the least flashy.

A new international network has been created specifically around the valuation of intangible assets, bringing together organizations from intellectual property, valuation and commercialization communities.

Its mission includes improving methods for valuing things such as brands, patents, intellectual property and data.

Think about what that says about the economy.

For centuries, wealth was relatively easy to see.

Land.

Factories.

Ships.

Machines.

Buildings.

Inventory.

Today some of the world's most valuable assets cannot be touched at all.

An algorithm.

A patent.

A database.

A reputation.

A network.

An idea.

Increasingly, economics is attempting to measure invisible things that create very visible consequences.

The Small-Business Lesson

For owners of privately held businesses, all these seemingly unrelated developments point toward the same conclusion.

The next generation of business value will depend less on simply owning assets and increasingly on building organizations capable of surviving change.

That means diversified customers.

Documented processes.

Strong management.

Transferable relationships.

Reliable financial records.

Technology that increases productivity rather than merely creating another monthly subscription.

And businesses that can continue making intelligent decisions after the founder finally goes fishing.

The marketplace is becoming increasingly unforgiving toward businesses whose entire operating manual resides between the owner's ears.

At the same time, it may become increasingly generous toward companies that transform personal knowledge into institutional knowledge.

There Is More Good News Than the News Suggests

None of this requires pretending everything is fine.

It isn't.

People are dying in wars. Climate change is imposing real costs. Governments are struggling with enormous debt burdens. Artificial intelligence will eliminate some jobs even while creating others. Political polarization remains severe.

Optimism that requires ignoring reality is just denial wearing a cheerful hat.

But pessimism can become equally intellectually lazy.

Because simultaneously, scientists are researching.

Engineers are building.

Entrepreneurs are opening businesses.

Buyers are purchasing them.

Governments are negotiating.

Investors are financing new ideas.

Renewable energy is expanding.

International organizations are developing standards for assets that barely existed a generation ago.

And millions of ordinary people got up this morning and quietly made their corner of civilization function.

The world has always advanced this way—not as a straight line, but as a messy argument between destruction and creation.

Perhaps that is the larger lesson hiding inside something as seemingly dry as a business-valuation newsletter.

Value is rarely static.

It moves.

It transfers.

It evolves.

It sometimes hides where our old accounting systems cannot see it.

That is true of companies.

It may also be true of civilizations.

And despite everything happening around us right now, there remains an extraordinary amount of human effort being invested in building things worth transferring to whoever comes next.