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…

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…

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…

Just received David Gurteen's latest Knowledge Lletter and was struck by his opener:

Some sound advice here from David Ogilivy. We send an email when we would do better to walk around to the person we wish to engage and have a conversation with them or failing that pick up the phone.

In reading this, I…

It's true and very easy to see in this calculation from Ocean Tomo.

I use the figure a lot. The fact that 80% of the value of the average business is intangible. It’s an…

Words matter.

They shape our thinking and shape our conversations.

Here are some really common conversations I have with new business acquaintances:

I ask what they do. They ask what I do. I say (of course!) that I work with…

I’m a little obsessed about the untapped intangible capital inside organizations. This IC represents potential growth, innovation and the prosperity we crave for our communities. But it often lies fallow because management and even the employees themselves fail to understand their collective power.

That’s why I…

It happened again this week. It’s happening more and more. I call customer service or I buy something and I get the email asking me to fill out a quick survey.

Sometimes there are a number of questions with this one at the bottom. Sometimes it’s just the one question:

How likely are you to recommend our company to your…

We are living in the middle of an historic revolution that is taking us from an industrial to a social, intangible capital-based economy. This revolution is visible everywhere but one place that I love to watch is in how the intangible capital economy is changing one of the oldest human activities: agriculture.  Here’s some context:

One of the turning points in…

Most of what we do as managers and most of what is still taught in business schools is a toolset that was perfected in the industrial era for managing factories. It shows people how to manage from the top down and is built on the assumption that the boss has all the answers. Org charts are the prototypical view of the organization under this model.

We all know that…

As 2013 has opened, the merger business has, as theNY Times reported, “roared back to life” with more activity than has been seen since 2007, the year before the Great Recession…

I’m really happy to announce that the International Conference on Intellectual Capital and Knowledge Managementis going to be in the U.S. this fall. It’s been five years since the last time the conference was in the U.S. so I am very excited—I think the U.S. is more ready than ever for the intangible capital message!

The dates are October 24-25 at George…

Jay Deragon had a great post last week on analysis versus synthesis. His points are really well taken and directly applicable to the challenges of…

There’s a new report out summarized under the headline Goodwill Impairment Holds Steady this week on the Business Finance site.

The article is full of data on things like total impairments, goodwill as a percentage of total assets, total…

For those who still don’t think social technologies will turn corporations upside down, here’s a dispatch from the front lines that you shouldn’t ignore: Even if It Outrages the Boss, Social Net Speech Is Protected.

In it, the NY Times reports that

Federal regulators are ordering employers to scale…

Over the weekend, I led a session for the NorthEast Regional Council Quarterly Educational Session for IMA, the Institute of Management Accountants.

This was my third talk with an IMA group and it was as fun as the last ones. Unlike…

This essay was written for a book to be published later this year in Italy by Smarter-Companies member Andrea Gasperini. We'll share a link to the book when it comes out!

I write this essay as we enter the year 2013. A new year is a popular time for predictions. There’s always risk in trying to make predictions but I welcome the opportunity to sketch…