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

Intangibles Measurement IV: Indicators and Performance Management

Here’s the next post in my intangibles measurement series. The last two posts have provided details on investment and assessment. This time, I am going to talk about the third kind of data: indicators.

Indicators and performance management are the most widely used forms of intangibles management today. This approach arose in direct response to the limitations of financial data in understanding the knowledge era business. Common approaches build a dashboard to show key performance indicators (KPI’s) of the company’s operations. Sometimes the dashboard is associated with a balance scorecard as well.

The idea is to identify data points that are leading indicators of strategic success and track them closely. Read more

Intangibles Measurement III: Assessment

Here’s the next post in my intangibles measurement series. In my last post, I made the case for measuring your annual investment in intangibles. Tracking how much you are spending is the logical starting point for measuring intangibles.

Once you understand how much you have spent, of course the next step is to ask whether you are getting your money’s worth. Is your investment giving you the results you expected? If you try to do this on a purely financial basis, you are going to reach a dead end very quickly. As explained in my last post, intangibles get very limited attention in today’s accounting paradigm.

That’s why assessment in your best bet for getting at intangible performance quickly and accurately. Read more