(FORTUNE Magazine) – THE MOST VALUABLE product on this planet is not the microchip, not the automobile, not the television set. No, sir. What has produced more wealth than any other thing dreamed of by the mind of man is sugar water, or at least a particular type of it known as Coca-Cola. As of the end of 1994, Coca-Cola, the company, had piled up a mountain of treasure nearly $61 billion high essentially by selling that single, simple product for over 100 years.

Coke's achievement vaults it over General Electric, another spry centenarian and last year's leader in the wealth-creation sweepstakes. Coke is now America's most prolific creator of riches, and its chief executive, Roberto Goizueta, the Midas with the best touch. Sorry, Jack Welch, even with GE's jet engines, steam turbines, CAT scans, refrigerators, industrial diamonds, and light bulbs, this year you're No. 2. The wealth that GE has brought to life totals a mere $52 billion.

These big dollar figures are not the companies' annual profits or revenues, the usual measures used to gauge financial performance. Instead they represent something called market value added. Devised by New York City consultants Stern Stewart, MVA goes to the heart of why businesses exist: It asks whether a company has increased or diminished the capital entrusted to it by shareholders and lenders. In other words, has the enterprise created wealth? That is what Coke and GE have created, that $61 billion and $52 billion of MVA, and they have made more of it than anybody else.

Nothing could be more fundamental than MVA, yet thousands of business people pay little attention to it. Those who do can use it to better manage their businesses. Investors can use it to better manage their money; as the scorecard of this year's top ten wealth creators (above) shows, high MVA companies tend to be stock market darlings. (A much larger list of companies measured by MVA will appear in FORTUNE later this year.)

WHILE MVA may sound like another one of those irritating acronyms for something too complicated for real words, conceptually it is as simple and old-fashioned as a kick in the pants. Stern Stewart begins by figuring the total capital tied up in a company over its life. First it adds up all the profits a company has reinvested in the business and all the money gathered from stockholders and lenders. Then the consultants reclassify certain accounting items to reflect what they really are. R&D spending becomes an investment in future earnings, for example; that's obviously what it is, even though accounting rules require that it be called an expense. Make those adjustments, and you get total capital.

Stern Stewart then calculates a second figure from the market value of all the company's equity and debt. The difference of those two numbers gives you the MVA. If a company's market value is less than all the capital that was put into it, its MVA is negative. Its managers have destroyed capital. If the company's MVA is positive, its managers have made money in the most basic meaning of the phrase. And the higher the MVA, the better the job management has done.

That raises a particularly interesting question about Goizueta and Welch. Both men took over their companies at nearly the same time: Goizueta on March 1, 1981; Welch exactly a month later. Both set out to remake their businesses. It is now 14 years later, and clearly both men succeeded. But who has created more wealth? Is it Goizueta, the elegant, cerebral chief of essentially a one-product shop, which Warren Buffett has described as the "best large business in the world"? Or has the extroverted, shirtsleeved Welch, widely regarded as the best manager of a large business in the world, produced more riches? FORTUNE asked Stern Stewart to run the numbers and calculate each company's MVA during its CEO's tenure. The envelope, please.

Turns out that both Goizueta and Welch are responsible for virtually all the wealth that Coke and GE have generated since 1892, when both businesses were originally incorporated. When Goizueta took over, Coke's MVA was $1.8 billion. When Welch grabbed the reins at GE, the company had a negative MVA of $387 million. But in this calculation Goizueta wins, having created $59 billion in MVA during his tenure, vs. Welch's $52 billion. And the secret of Goizueta's success? In reply, he quotes a precept attributed to Dr. Scholl, among others: "Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise."

Of course conglomerates and one-trick ponies are not the only kinds of companies that can spin gold. The eight other outfits that round out the top ten list demonstrate that companies in virtually any sector of the market can produce billions in MVA. No surprise is Merck, a major player in the highly profitable pharmaceutical business. But the No. 3 company in MVA and the 1992 champ, Wal-Mart, operates in the razor-thin profit-margin world of discount retailing. Philip Morris continues as an MVA heavyweight despite worries about tobacco litigation and pressures on earnings stemming from Marlboro Friday. Procter & Gamble, a household products company, and Johnson & Johnson, which makes health care supplies, show that for all the talk about the death of brands, there's still plenty of money to be made from stuff like P&G's Tide and J&J's Band-Aids. Motorola and AT&T provide proof that long-established technology-oriented companies can create wealth too. By far the fastest-rising player among the top ten is software maker Microsoft. In its 20 short years of life , Microsoft has created more wealth than companies five times its size and four times its age. If Bill Gates' money machine continues at its present clip, Coke won't be the top dog for long. Jokes G. Bennett Stewart III, a partner at Stern Stewart: "The marketplace is recognizing that Microsoft is taking over the world."

For investors, a crucial insight of MVA is to beware of companies that pursue growth for its own sake. Unless the capital employed to generate earnings produces more wealth than it costs, MVA tends to stagnate, and investors get nowhere. That piece of wisdom is being seized on by ever more companies, and stock pickers see the change in philosophy as a "buy" signal. Analyst Leslie Ravitz at Morgan Stanley, for instance, recently upgraded his rating of diversified-chemical maker Olin from "neutral" to "outperform" because it had adopted the principles behind MVA. Under the new system, compensation for Olin's top managers will increasingly depend on their ability to generate profits that exceed the cost of capital allocated to their units, instead of, say, the size of the operation measured by sales or assets. If the managers don't create wealth for shareholders, they won't get rich, either. For Olin the new scheme marks a sea change in the way the company is being run, but for investors, isn't this the way it was always supposed to be?