What’s the Right Definition of Intellectual Property?

We have been circulating review copies of our book. We make the case that structural capital–knowledge captured in the organization–falls into two main categories: process and intellectual property (IP).

And the most controversial part has been our contention that:

All the knowledge that is captured and recorded in your company is IP… Read more

This Friday: IAFS Call on Measuring Reputation

On Friday (10/2)  at noon EDT, I will once again be hosting the monthly Mission: Intangible conversation for the Intangible Asset Finance Society.

Our guest will be Gary Williams, CEO of wRatings. Gary’s firm provides ratings of more than 5,000 companies that are built, in part, on consumer and business customer reviews of the companies’ offerings.

As you know, I believe that reputation is the new bottom line so I am especially looking forward to this interview. There is no charge to participate in the call but you must register in advance. Recordings are also available for a small charge.

Shareholder Value is Bankrupt: What Will Replace It?

Earlier this year, Jack Welch made the statement to the Financial Times that “shareholder value is the dumbest idea in the world…your main constituencies are your employees, your customers and your products.” This is part of a FT series on the Future of Capitalism.

A couple weeks ago, the Aspen Institute released a paper signed by a group of 28 executives that included Warren Buffet (CEO, Berkshire Hathaway), Lou Gerstner Retired CEO, IBM) and John Bogle (Founder, The Vanguard Group). The paper entitled, Overcoming Short-termism, opens by saying: Read more

IC: Define It, Understand It, Capture It

Here’s my presentation to the Association for Consulting Expertise in Maine:

If you were there, let me know your thoughts and/or questions. If you weren’t there, please chime in too!

Lost Intangible Value in M&A

Here’s a question from Richard E. on SlideShare about my recent presentation on Intangible Asset Performance and Financial Results.

Richard E: From your experience when you have visited organisations and they value Goodwill. Can you relate intangible elements that are common across various companies? Same too if an organisation has Intellectual Property and then a merger occurs I suggest for the new combined organisation a loss occurs in respect of the intangibles capital. Perhaps in such instances there may be merit for the lessons learnt of optimizing intangibles before and after a merger to mitigate the potential loss. It’s just an idea, hope it appeals

Here’s my response: Read more

Hear Mary Adams Speak on Friday

Intellectual Capital: Define it, Understand it, Capture it, will be the topic of Mary Adams’ speech at the Association for Consulting Expertise on September 18th in Portland ME. This is open to the public so hope to see you there!

McKinsey’s New Innovation Metric

I have faulted McKinsey before for suggesting simplistic metrics that can provide interesting historical data but be very dangerous as guides to management. So I read their latest suggestion on tracking innovation performance score with some skepticism.

They don’t really explain how they calculate it but the sense of it is that they look at how much a company outperforms its competition over a five to seven year period and assume that this compound annual growth rate is a measure of a firm’s innovation performance. Here are a few thoughts. Read more

What will next year’s Labor Day look like?

Today is a strange Labor Day. The holiday was created as a way to get back to work. Yet the U.S. economy currently has a high unemployment rate, not counting those that have stopped looking for work and those that are independent and/or permanent contractors, whose work (or lack of) does not get counted in these statistics.

This unemployment is happening at a moment of incredible challenge (and, yes, opportunity). The challenges facing our nation (and our globe) include the need for sustainable energy production and use (to avoid wars and to save the environment), the need for sensible health care, the need for healthy food and the need for better education (I’m sure you can think of many more). Each one of these challenges represents opportunities that could fuel our economy for decades.

Yet here we sit. Paralyzed by assumptions and models that are failing us. Read more

Intangibles Measurement V: Reputation is the New Bottom Line

There are huge challenges all over our economy–in health care, in transportation, in agriculture, in energy production, in education, and on and on. These challenges will not be resolved by resorting to industrial era answers. To solve today’s problems, we need to build our national skills base for intangibles management.

Which is a great segue to reputation, the last in my intangibles measurement series. The general reputation of business gets talked about a fair amount these days. As does the importance of reputation to individual companies. Today, the speed of communication makes it hard to hide even small mistakes. And sometimes small mistakes get blown out of proportion. The easy answer is to blame the media. There are two other answers that cannot be ignored. Read more