The Intangible Drivers of Business Value

I was thrilled this month to have the opportunity to give a webinar for Business Valuation Resources on intangibles. I showed the audience the usual slides I often use to show the growth in intangibles in our economy.

The lessons for valuation professionals is two fold:

1. They will be valuing many more intangibles as stand-alone assets in the future
2. But they should already be considering the intangible drivers of corporate value NOW

My talk focused on the second point. Read more

Why are you creating your measurement management system? (And do you really need a balanced scorecard?)

A few years ago, I read an article by Ian Graham called, What’s Wrong with Targets? Graham made the case that setting targets or goals for employees creates the wrong kind of behavior. This is because it focuses the employee on the target rather than on the underlying processes that create value for customers and stakeholders. And once a goal is achieved, there is often no reason to reach further. He also asserts that targets can be gamed. The alternative he suggests is to focus on specific processes and measure everything you can with an eye to continuous learning. His perspective comes out of the quality movement and the concept of continuous improvement.

We thought of Graham recently when we read an article about the games that colleges play to ensure that they meet the thresholds for statistics used by US News and others to “rank” colleges. Areas that can be manipulated include soliciting alumni donations of as little as $1 to increase their alumni giving percentage, giving more weight to applicant GPA and SAT scores than in the past, and manipulating class size.  Anyone who has ever worked in a for-profit or not-for-profit organization knows that goals can drive behavior in good and bad ways. Read more

Five Reasons Your Organization Should Assess Its Intangibles

In posts over the past weeks, I have already shown you some simple but powerful ways of generating concrete information about your intangibles. The first is generating an inventory of key knowledge assets. The second is building a graphic or model that serves as a shared visualization of how your company combines and monetizes those assets in your knowledge factory. And the third is to start tracking your annual intangible capital expenditure.

But is it enough to just know how much money has been spent? Isn’t it also important to know whether your investment is working as well as you expected? Is it ready to handle your future challenges? Is your knowledge factory working up to its capacity? How do you know if your knowledge factory is functioning the way it should? Are these not the important questions that need to be answered in your business?
Read more

CIO’s–and CFO’s–Need to “Get Real”

There is an interesting report at CFO.com called CFOs to CIOs: Get Real.

My response is that CFO’s need to “get real” too.

One of the biggest barriers between CFO’s and CIO’s is how they view the cost of projects. CFO’s are trapped inside an accounting model that expenses a lot of investments. Recent macro data suggested that US businesses spent $1.7 trillion on intangibles versus $1.2 on tangibles. For the most part, intangibles get expensed, tangibles get capitalized. Many  of these intangibles are related to IT-enabled systems and/or processes. Read more