There is a brief but powerful article in Wired this month about a crowd-sourced alternative to traditional credit rating agencies, Rick Calculators: Forget Moody’s and S&P. These guys know how to beat both.
The article features Freerisk.org, which provides XBRL data from SEC filings to what the article calls “a volunteer army of finance geeks.” It quotes co-founder Jesper Andersen:
The problem is too big to leave to private profit centers.
This is a great application of the power of the knowledge era. And it’s a critical first step. But it won’t be enough.
Remember that the majority of reporting in the data everyone uses (including Freerisk) is produced under a financial accounting paradigm that is broken. Modern accounting cannot describe the roughly 70-80% of every company’s value that is off balance sheet. For some reason, everyone inside our financial system continues to put up with a system that focuses on tangible assets that are NOT the key drivers of earnings, competitive position or future outlook of a company.
We need to get this intellectual capital into the reporting stream. The first step is for companies to learn how to see and measure these assets internally. Some of our ideas on how to do this are in the award-winning article I wrote last year for the Emerald Business Strategy Series, Management 2.0: Leveraging the Growing Intangible Side of Your Business. I welcome your thoughts.
Along the way, I have become an active blogger. This new format enables me to share a greater variety of blog posts and writings–as well as news about our practice. The longer version of my story is in the footnote at the end of this newsletter.
Please let me know what you think of the new format. I’d love to hear your suggestions on content and areas of interest you may have related to the challenges of managing intangibles in your business.
Cheers, Mary
Smarter Companies - Featured Posts
Getting Paid for Free Products - My favorite post this month at Smarter Companies shared a story from Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun. He explained how he justified a $1 million purchase price to a customer for a piece of free software. Read more
Disclosure on the Web - You heard it here first: the disclosure of corporate information is beginning to be made directly by companies via their websites. To quote former SEC Chair Cox, in an era of “24-hour news–and even 24-hour pizza delivery–why are we still living by the 10-K and the 10-Q?…[investors will] need user friendly, responsive numbers that are easily accessible.” Read more
IT in a Recession - Due to the current recession, when you mention IT, most folks focus on cost-cutting. But there are real opportunities to increase the return you get by spending time with users to ensure that they are using all the capabilities, optimizing processes and integrating with your external stakeholders’ needs. Read more
IC Knowledge Center -Featured Posts
Forces Behind the Reporting Shift - Posts on reports by PWC and Deloitte that explain why and how the shift to a knowledge-based economy is driving a serious information gap between what stakeholders need to know and the information they actually receive. Read more here and here.
Changing Investor Dynamics - Post on the book Citizen Investors that explains how ownership of the majority of US and UK stocks is held by small investors (mostly through funds). These investors will continue to push for more transparency. Read more here
A New Network You May Want to Join - Henrik Martin at our partner company, Intellectual Capital Sweden, is extending an invitation to our readers to join the LinkedIn “Network of Intellectual Capital Professionals.” If you are interested, you can request an invite here.
What’s New at Intellectual Capital Advisors?
Book Contract - Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak have signed a contract for a book with the working title, Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Corporation. Read more here
Award for Article - Right after we got the book contract, we received word that the article that was the inspiration for the book received an Emerald Literati Award. Read more here
(by the way…we are re-using the title of this article as the new title of this newsletter)
Speaking Appearances - In April, Mary Adams will be speaking at the European Conference on Intellectual Capital and at the Warsaw Knowledge Management Association. Read more here
Footnote: How I Got Here
Here’s the longer version of the story about the evolution of this newsletter and my businesses:
I started my career as a high risk lender. In this career, I learned to understand the whole story of a business through its financial statements. When I started a consulting firm ten years ago, financials were already starting to fail us. As we have moved from an industrial to a knowledge economy, more and more of the critical assets that drive performance and growth are invisible in our accounting systems–intangibles like knowledge, competencies, processes, relationships and brands. This information gap leads to bad decisions and inconsistent corporate valuations.
About five years ago, I found the vocabulary and research that answered many of my questions about the direction of business and the changing practice of management– in the field of intellectual capital.As I began to grow my personal bibliography, I decided to put it on the web in the IC Knowledge Center. The initial incarnation of this newsletter was a monthly update of new content on the newsletter. The newsletter is now syndicated globally through the IC Rating network.
Last summer, my partner, Michael Oleksak, and I decided to create Intellectual Capital Advisors (ICA). I turned the IC Knowledge Center into a blog and also started a blog for ICA at Smarter Companies. The blogs have been an amazing way of meeting people from all over the world and sharing ideas with them.
Going forward, I hope to share some of my richest experiences with the blogs, my speaking, writing and consulting–so that we can experience together the emergence of intangibles management practices, that is, Management 2.0.
Hope you enjoyed this digest of news from our company and two blogs.
Remember that we post dozens of items each month. If this content interests you, please consider signing up to receive a feed of all posts at Smarter Companies via RSS feed or email.
Mary Adams’ article entitled Management 2.0 Managing the growing intangible side of your business published in Emerald Business Strategy Series has been chosen as a Highly Commended Award Winner at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2009. The award notification explained:
The award winning papers are chosen following consultation amongst the journal’s Editorial Team, many of whom are eminent academics or managers. Your paper has been selected as it was one of the most impressive pieces of work the team has seen throughout 2008.
The award is especially gratifying as the article became the basis of a book proposal recently purchased by Praeger’s Greenwood Press. The book is expected in the market by early 2010.
Umair Haque has a great post here that talks about Obama as a radical management innovator. He says that the campaign built:
…a new kind of political organization for the 21st century. It differs from yesterday’s political organizations as much as Google and Threadless differ from yesterday’s corporations: all are a tiny handful of truly new, 21st century institutions in the world today.
He goes on to identify seven management lessons Read more
Thanks to Ken Jarboe at the Athena Alliance for letting us know about the publication of the report of the conference hosted last year (2008) by the National Academies in Washington DC entitled Intangible Assets: Measuring and Enhancing Their Contribution to Corporate Value and Economic Growth: Summary of a Workshop. Back ...
Steve Tobak echoes the feeling that I often have when the media or any number of corporate stakeholders are surprised by poor behavior of their leaders in Leaders Will Start Acting Like Adults When We Do. He is basically saying that we cannot expect miracles from leaders because they are as ...
What is really the difference between the Professor Chen Yu invention: "Consumption Capital", and what we in the Intellectual Capital world like to refer to as Customer Capital? This is not all that easy to answer. After two conferences on the Consumption Capital topic in Beijing (see my earlier blog ...
Mary Adams’ article entitled Management 2.0 Managing the growing intangible side of your business published in Emerald Business Strategy Series has been chosen as a Highly Commended Award Winner at the Emerald Literati Network Awards for Excellence 2009. The award notification explained:
