Five Reasons to Focus on Optimizing Intangibles in 2010

I am more and more convinced that 2010 will be the year of intangibles, intangible assets, intangible capital, intellectual capital, knowledge assets or whatever else you want to call them. There are five big reasons why:

1. Intangibles already get the majority of your  investment dollars. Estimates are that at least 60% of the money organizations invest in their future productive capacity is in intangibles. If you are already spending money, isn’t time you created a way to track intangibles performance? 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

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

Call on Intangible Asset Risk and Reputation Metrics

Intangible Asset Finance Society Monthly Call: The President of Intellectual Capital Advisors, Mary Adams, will be hosting Nir Kossovsky on the IAFS monthly call this Friday, July 10th at noon EDT.

Nir is the Chief Executive & Director of Steel City Re, a firm focused on innovating new ways of managing intangible risk. He is also an entertaining speaker and will surely keep Mary on her toes! The call is free but you must register to get the conference information. Hope you can join us!

Program on Relationship Capital Risks this Friday

Mary Adams hosts the monthly call of the Intangible Asset Finance Society on the first Friday of every month. This month’s call on Friday, April 3rd at 12 noon EDT is entitled: IMPOSING PERFORMANCE (BEHAVIOR) REQUIREMENTS ON A COMMERCIAL PARTNER:

Cadbury Schweppes, Kellogg, Mattel – all iconic firms whose products, cash flows, and reputations have been sullied by their business partners through ethical breaches including melamine in milk, salmonella in peanut butter, and lead paint. Read more

Capital is Consensus

A great follow up to my post on Bananas and Industrialization is in this amazing post from Umair Haque How to Be a 21st Century Capitalist. He explains that:

20th century capitalism, in other words, marginally valued pure financial capital too highly, while marginally valuing human, natural, social, and cultural capital at zero – or, at the limit, negatively.

He goes on to say that “capital is consensus” which Read more

The New Building Blocks of Business

The growing importance of intellectual capital to the success of companies is leading to changes in the field of management. The best way to understand these changes is to visualize them in relation to the ten building blocks of a traditional business Read more

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