Street Smarts: Intangible Capital In Action

I stole this title from an article I read recently in Time. The article Street Smarts is about infrastructure. And why infrastructure changes need to be planned in a new way.

Just as we industrialized every corner of our economy in the last era, so too must we knowledgeize every corner today. Infrastructure is no exception.

What does that mean? It means that we have to re-think every challenge and find the most efficient solution. And remember that we have many new tools that we didn’t have before. Here are just a few of the examples cited in the Time article: Read more

Is Boeing a Smarter Company (or Not)?

There have been a number of people talking again about Boeing’s difficulties with the 787. Among the critics you can count ParaPundit, Michael Mandel and Dick Nolan.

In our book and blog, we include a discussion of Boeing in our discussion of relationship capital:

Technology makes it easier than ever for you to connect and collaborate with your vendors. A great illustration of this potential is the Boeing 787. The design of this plane represented a new approach by Boeing. Using an electronic system, the company was on-line with the hundred or so key vendors that would manufacture components and parts for the jet.

More than ever before, Boeing pushed the design decisions out to the vendors, each of whom has specific expertise related to their part of the plane. 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?
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Knowledge Workers: Special Challenges at the Highest and Lowest Levels

Over the years, we have worked in companies of all sizes to help them grow their businesses and adapt to changing global and local markets. So we have to confess that we have had our share of experience with employees within our client companies that do not buy into the vision that we have put forth here about knowledge workers. The greatest skepticism comes at both ends of the employee spectrum—the highest-level and the lowest-level knowledge workers. Read more

The Role of a Manager in the Knowledge Era

In the knowledge era, the ability to access and leverage knowledge for competitive advantage is critical to corporate success. But knowledge is rarely concentrated at the top of organizations. There is still a need for top-down communication and direction but this must be balanced with knowledge flows from the bottom up and the outside in to organizations—and changes the job of a manager. Today’s manager is always working to balance these knowledge flows.

So what is the right balance? Read more

Making the choice to become an intangible capitalist

Intangible capital. It’s all I talk about. Mostly in pieces, explaining all the little pieces and nuances.

But today, I want to take a step back and describe what a company would look like if it were maximizing its intangible capital. So open your mind and imagine a company where: Read more

How Many Workers Are Knowledge Workers?

The change in the American workforce has been evolving slowly over the past century. Over this time, the dominant jobs have shifted from materials extraction and processing to information processing. The trend was constant and consistent over the century for the primary and tertiary sectors. The secondary sector actually peaked at 50% in 1960 and then trended back down to end the century where it started. The following chart is from PBS The First Measured Century (a fun book and website). Read more

Horizontal or Vertical: two views of the organization—which is right?

An image that we have used over and over again in recent years to explain the managerial implications of  the knowledge era is depicted in this graphic. It is an abstraction of the organization chart. Like an organization chart, the triangular figure is wider at the bottom where there are more people at the bottom working in units or on projects. There is a management level that connects the “worker” to the corporate or executive level. As you will see throughout the coming chapters, the shift to the knowledge era is necessitating greater emphasis on the bottom of this triangle.  Read more

The Superpower of the Knowledge Era: Process

Process is not new to business. In fact, process in the form of production lines was a critical driver of the growth of the industrial economy. In a factory, you could see the physical movement of raw material as it moved from the warehouse into a series of production lines with finished goods coming out the other end. The movement of goods, and the productivity of the machines and the output of the entire factory could be tracked. Accounting and operational systems made it possible to measure everything from the purchase of the land to build the factory down to the last widget being put onto a truck. It also, by the way, made it easier for bosses to identify the best way to do a task and mandate the work patterns of their workers.

Much of what is today views as “best practices” in management comes from the factories of the industrial era.

But today, a lot of process occurs inside of people’s heads, their computers and networks of computers spread across a building or across the globe. Read more

Relationship Capital, Starting With Your Customers

As with human capital, relationship capital has always been a part of business.

Organizations have always had customers, vendors and financing partners, to name a few. But the nature of these relationships has been changing more dramatically in recent years. First of all, networking technology has made it easier to outsource pieces of a business that were formerly inside the corporation. The relationships with critical outsourcing partners are closer than that of arms-length client-vendor relationships.

You may find yourself on both sides of this dynamic, performing outsourced services for your customers but also outsourcing some of your internal processes to a vendor. Read more

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