Historically Human Capital has been viewed by organizations as a pool of labor from which to gain productivity. This historical view brought about all kinds of human productivity measures much like the way industrial organizations measured the productivity of machines. Furthering this view we saw incentive schemes…

Human Capital is a critical element of Intangible capital that is measured by ICounting. Human Capital can be either an asset a liability--depending on how stakeholders view the performance of your human capital. Human capital is people. And people are at the heart of any organization. Calling people…

A business simply cannot survive without good relationships. Yet many businesses think they can improve results without considering how their decisions impact relationships. There is a clear correlation between how an organization treats people (partners, suppliers, customers, employees, contractors) and bottom…

Relationship Capital is one of the four cornerstones of intangible capital measured by ICounting. Relationship Capital can be both an asset and/or a liability depending on how stakeholders view the performance of your relationship capital.

This includes all kinds of relationships with…

There is a clear and succinct post at WSJ I recommend called Shift to Valuations, Estimates Challenges Auditors  that talks about the challenges auditors face…

In today’s marketplace organizations cannot afford to simply manage by results. An organization’s results are the effect of cumulative interactions between people, processes, markets, and the organizations strategy. Managing by results usually means adding or subtracting to reach a desired…

Over the coming weeks, we will be doing a series of posts, videos and slide shows aimed at providing definitions to terms we tend to take for granted. We’ll start with Intangible Capital then we’ll cover each of the elements highlighted below as an individual post with more detail. Each of the posts…

Every month business managers review their financial results. They discuss revenues, expenses of the previous month and projections for the next month. They discuss special variations in the operating expenses or planned capital expenses. If the numbers are good everyone smiles. If the numbers are bad everyone…

Sometimes when I talk about intangible capital I feel that people think I am speaking in a foreign language. We use terms that are different from what has been taught in our colleges, our businesses and in the marketplace.

Intangible capital does have its own language. We speak about human capital,…

Jay Deragon pointed out yesterday an interview with Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google about disruptive technologies. He opens by saying:

We’re going, in a single lifetime, from a small elite having…

One of the challenges we all face in the intangible capital field is awareness. Very few people actually know what IC is and when they hear about the ideas, it sounds too theoretical. I'm always looking to find ways to get past those barriers and get inside peoples' heads.

In a conversation earlier this week, I was reminded of a story told by…

In a couple of previous years, I did a rough overview of the federal government's investment in intangible assets. Today I am releasing my analysis of the President's FY2014 budget request:…

A business measures its performance based on an income statement and a balance sheet. One measures profitability and the other measures asset appreciation or depreciation. These two instruments of measure are considered the financial scorecards of industry and have been used…

Everyday people go into the “job cage" and jump on the same wheel they ran on the day before. Management measures the output of all the wheels collectively then attempts to optimize each wheel to improve the whole. What management doesn't realize is that by tinkering with each wheel they are sub-optimizing the whole.

The "job cage" is the environment we are bound to…

Much of the mental models, and subsequent behaviors, of modern corporations are actual left over from the days of feudalism. This is how leaders of corporations (lords) came to believe employees (vassals) were given jobs (fiefs) but the corporation owned the person(s) skills and knowledge that performed the work.

Feudalism describes a set of reciprocal legal…