Mary Adams Receives Emerald Literati Award

Mary Adams’ article entitled Management 2.0 Managing the growing intangible side of your business published in Emerald Business Strategy Series has been chosen as a Highly Commended Award Winner at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2009. The award notification explained:

The award winning papers are chosen following consultation amongst the journal’s Editorial Team, many of whom are eminent academics or managers. Your paper has been selected as it was one of the most impressive pieces of work the team has seen throughout 2008.

The award is especially gratifying as the article became the basis of a book proposal recently purchased by Praeger’s Greenwood Press. The book is expected in the market by early 2010.

Please feel free to download an  executive summary The New Basics of Business or a revised version of the article Management 2.0–and experience these breakthrough concepts first hand through ICA services.

Management Lessons on Web 2.0

Thanks to KNOW Network here for the great summary of McKinsey’s suggestions here on how to make Web 2.0 work:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.
2. The best uses come from users – but they require help to scale.
3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.
4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs – not just their wallets.
5. The right solution comes from the right participants.
6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. Read more

Smarter Accountants and Lawyers

Here are a couple of interesting follow ups to my post on legal business models:

The first is from the Journal of Accountancy here. It profiles accounting firms that are looking to create models based on value rather than time. The article profiles four firms that are blazing trails in this endeavor because, although my title implies otherwise, most accountants are in the same boat with lawyers–they are selling time, not value. Read more

Corporate Web Disclosure

Great post here from the Q4 blog on examples of companies starting to use web disclosure as a corporate reporting strategy under new guidelines issued by the SEC. It cites a couple examples including BGC Partners and GM:

The lesson from GM is that what’s needed to aid news dissemination is to get people to follow you. This supports the importance of building a subscriber base and transitioning to a web disclosure model over time, while you use notice-and-access releases and other methods to let the market know where you disclose your information, and how they can receive automatic updates.

Here’s my post from awhile back on a sample site built by PWC to show a different approach to corporate reporting. The changes outlined here are a great first step toward the ideal set out by PWC.

Bottoms Up (Temporary) Pay Cut

I have shared a number of examples here lately of organizations asking their employees to cut back their hours to avoid lay-offs. Here’s a story from Jay Hargis’ blog, HRCleanUp.

Teachers and public employees in Lynn, Massachusetts have volunteered to work one day without pay to help the city avoid lay-offs. I love the bottoms-up approach. As Jay says, we really are all in this together. Hurray for the employees of Lynn!

Getting Paid for Free Products

I just read this great story in the blog by Sun’s CEO, Jonathan Schwartz:

One of my favorite customer stories relates to an American company that did nearly 30% of its yearly revenue on Christmas Day. They were a mobile phone company, whose handsets appeared under Christmas trees, opened en masse and provisioned on the internet within about a 48 hour period. When we won the bid to supply their datacenter, their CIO gave me the purchase order on the condition I gave him my home phone number. He said, “If I have any issues on Christmas, I want you on the phone making sure every resource available is solving the problem.” I happily provided it (and then made sure I had my direct staff’s home numbers). Christmas came and went, no problems at all. Read more

Richard Florida on Homeownership and Our Economy

I have been reading the group blog (which I recommend)  led by Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class and Who’s Your City?  That’s where I heard about his latest article in The Atlantic entitled “How the Crash Will Reshape America.” Lots to think about in terms of our national human capital.

A few points of note (I quote):

• Substantial incentives for homeownership (from tax breaks to artificially low mortgage-interest rates) distort demand, Read more

The Innovation – Finance Link

I have always enjoyed Anand Sanwal’s writing on intangibles costs. Here‘s a great piece he wrote on the need to get finance tracking innovation efforts. I commented there and expand it here.

Anand  focuses on revenue as a metric. He made me think of Clay Christenson’s advice for managing innovation: encourage profits, not revenues. The idea is that managing innovation for profit ensures that the innovation is built within a business model that makes sense. Read more

IP and IC — a strategy or the strategy?

I had a really interesting exchange a couple weeks ago on the Tangible IP blog with Andrew Watson and Jordan Hatcher.

The question was: How to define “intellectual property strategy?” By the end, Andrew wrote:

The challenge I see though is that at some point along the scale of how wide the definition is drawn, one ends up almost redefining the business, or needing to turn it upside down to have the impact one wants to have. Few CEOs we know would buy that. So at least for now, we are drawing the box around the bits of intangibles (mainly innovation culture and placing proper systems around how the outputs from that are recognised and protected) that a CEO new to this area can comprehend.

I have been holding myself back on this one. I wasn’t going to answer him. Don’t want to mess with CEO’s. But I couldn’t help myself. So here goes:

I know that few CEO’s are ready or willing to face the fact. But the truth is that the drivers of almost every business today are intangible knowledge assets (which may or may not have legal protection and become IP). Eventually, we will have to redefine the business.

Intangible Definitions

One of the most frustrating parts of working in the “intangibles” management business is the lack of accepted definitions and (more importantly) shared understanding of what we mean.

Just the name is challenging. Here are a few of the most common: Read more

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