This new book by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake called Capitalism without Capital: The Rise…

Latest episode of the Building Smarter Companies video blog:

What are the most important resources driving the value and performance of your business? Learn about the seven kinds of capital that are critical to creating value--and how to use this model to develop integrated reporting for your shareholders and…

From the Building Smarter Companies Video Blog

 

In this episode, Mary Adams shares the mega-trends challenging traditional financial management and introduces the concept of integrated thinking and reporting. 

To learn more, subscribe to this channel or visit…

Episode 1.1 of my new Building Smarter Companies video blog!

Some of the most interesting intangible capital stories these days come from the intersection between businesses that seem to be heavily tangible but are actually succeeding based on their intangibles.  A recent post by Workbar talked about the…

The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) recently released its World Intellectual Property Report 2017 under the title Intangible Capital in Global Value Chains.  The key finding of…

I was reading a NY Times article this morning entitled, Best Buy’s Secrets for Surviving in the Amazon Age. Of course, I couldn’t help myself and I started tallying their intangible capitals in my head.  Thought I’d share my tally and the…

For many years, my work in the intellectual/intangible capital field focused on the kinds of capitals that are considered intangible from an accounting perspective: human, relationship and structural capital. But the integrated reporting movement has challenged me to see things more broadly. That movement combines three perspectives (click to view full size):…

The stated goal of integrated reporting is to explain “how a company creates value over time.”

To date, a lot of the focus in practice (and theory) has been on identifying the key capitals that drive this value creation. But the question about how value and the capitals change over time, and…

Today 100% of U.S. public companies provide accounting information publicly. It’s a requirement and an accepted practice. At the same time, over 80% of those…

Blackstone is the world’s largest investor. So it’s news when its CEO, Larry Fink, sends a letter to the CEO’s of the S&P 500. He sent one last year and just sent a new one this month that is printed in full at Business Insider in which he calls for longer-term thinking in American companies. It’s an exciting read for those of us who believe that longer-term thinking will…

Recently, I had a great conversation with two people in the corporate sustainability office of a NY-based company. They have been on a journey toward changing their actions and their communications to become more sustainable from an environmental and social perspective. They were talking to me because they…

New Year’s resolutions are just like a lot of corporate goals. They start out sounding great but don’t end up happening as planned. That’s because the primary focus is on the KPI’s, not on building the system to deliver on the KPI’s.

Here's a simple (hopefully not simplistic) analogy: A person has a…

In recent weeks, Chipotle has been through a number of crises where customers have grown ill. The first involved e coli-infected in Washington and Oregon. This week, 80 students fell sick with the in Massachusetts. Because I like to use Chipotle to explain integrated thinking, I’ve been paying special attention to this news.

Integrated thinking can be a powerful way of understanding what drives a company’s success. I often use Chipotle and Taco Bell as an illustration of how to…