Intellectual Capital Advice from Google’s Larry Page

In Larry Page’s commencement speech at the University of Michigan, he shares a lot of personal stories and also includes a gem about intellectual capital. The personal stories include his family’s connections to Michigan and a tribute to his Dad who was a professor there. He is an amazingly unassuming person. You won’t regret listening to the address.

What I want to talk about was one of his bits of advice at the end of his talk:

Technology and especially the internet can really help you be lazy. Lazy? What I mean is a group of three people can write software that millions can use and enjoy. Can three people answer the phone a million times a day? Find the leverage in the world, so you can be more lazy!

He didn’t elaborate but I will. Because this is the core value of the knowledge era: smart people can use technology to operationalize knowledge. And operationalized knowledge (the structural component of intellectual capital together with human and relationship capital) is almost infinitely scalable.

Google’s search engine is obviously a great example of this. But everything you do in your work day that operationalizes your knowledge, that helps you take a shortcut to get the same thing done tomorrow with less work, is creating structural capital.

In recent decades, almost every easy-to-automate process has been computerized. But it’s not stopping there. Now, we are getting to the fun stuff. Now we are going to harness connections to create better experiences for customers and business partners.

In the future, the intersection between IT and IC will continue to grow–to the point that it will be hard to identify when one ends and the other picks up. The value of IT/IC already dominates corporate value and earnings growth.  It’s time to get serious about measuring and managing IC.

Here are some slides that show how Page and his partner, Sergey Brin, operationalized their knowledge to create Google search, one of the greatest product stories in the history of business. The visualization approach used here is an important first step to good intangibles management. Get busy–so you can get lazy (maybe even rich) like Larry…