When the three of us decided to write a book, we were united by one strongly held principle: Corporate finance should be developed in terms of a few integrated, powerful ideas. We believed that the subject was all too often presented as a collection of loosely related topics, unified primarily by virtue of being bound together in one book, and we thought there must be a better way. One thing we knew for certain was that we didn’t want to write a “metoo” book. So, with a lot of help, we took a hard look at what was truly important and useful. In doing so, we were led to eliminate topics of dubious relevance, downplay purely theoretical issues, and minimize the use of extensive and elaborate calculations to illustrate points that are either intuitively obvious or of limited practical use.

当我们三人决定写一本书的时候，我们被一个坚定的原则团结在一起：公司财务应该用一些综合的、强有力的思想来发展。我们认为，这个主题经常被描述成一个松散相关的主题集合，主要是由于被装订在一本书中而统一起来，我们认为一定有更好的方法。有一件事我们可以肯定的是，我们不想写一本“metoo”的书。所以，在很多人的帮助下，我们仔细研究了什么才是真正重要和有用的。在这样做的过程中，我们被引导去消除那些可疑的相关话题，淡化纯粹的理论问题，并尽量减少使用广泛而细致的计算来说明那些直观上显而易见或实际用途有限的观点。