This book is about applying what is known about financial options to many everyday decisions that arise in business finance. The book has as its basis a specialized field in financial economics that has come to be known as "contingent claims analysis," and in that spirit the viewpoint throughout is that a wide variety of issues confronting managers of modern firms can be analyzed as options. The insights developed and explained herein, far from being new, are rather the product of important intellectual advances brought to us by scholars over the past few decades.