How much do you spend every year on accounting? It’s probably a lot. And at the end of the day, you get a balance sheet that explains just 20% of your total corporate value. You get very little information about your capacity to generate future growth, earnings and value.

That’s because the source of competitive advantage for every company has shifted. It used to come from hard assets you could see on the balance sheet. Today it’s about the quality of your people, processes, networks…

Why the rules for corporate reporting should change in an era of abundance

We are so used to the current conventions of accounting and corporate reporting that we never think to question them. But if you think about it, these conventions are based on the “I win, you lose” thinking of the industrial era. This is because that era (and…

Here’s where the contrast between Accounting and ICounting gets interesting.

Who cares about your Accounting? Your Accountant. Your banker. Your owners/shareholders. They care if you make a profit. And, indirectly, your stakeholders because they need you to remain financially viable.

But with ICounting, all your stakeholders have a vested interest. That’s…

In the old days, Accountants could help you understand what happened during the past months and years but they could also help you understand your productive capacity—which is really about your future ability to continue to operate and produce revenues and profits. This was possible because of an elegant solution to capital expenditures with a benefit beyond the current…

We had a great half-day session called Making the Intangibles Count earlier this week at the AM&AA Summer Conference

Over the course of the afternoon, we led some 100 M&A professionals on a discovery process to learn how to identify,…

My friends in the academic world who keep track of these things tell me that there are dozens of systems and frameworks that have been suggested for measurement and reporting of intangible capital. What many, many of them have in common is that they are trying to create a structure for reporting that moves in the direction of creating “standards.”

Normally, I would say that this is a good thing. Standards can be really valuable. They help simplify communication and collaboration.…

For those of us trained to think financially, we tend to think of the word “value” as a financial concept. As in, what is something “worth?” This is still a valid concept for intangibles. In fact, there are already well-established approaches to determining how much intangibles are “worth” using traditional valuation techniques. They are based on financial models and…

I often get requests from people asking if I can help them “value” their intangibles.

Sometimes they need a formal valuation for tax or compliance reasons. That’s easy because this is something a good valuation firm can do.

But most of the time, the person just has an unsettled feeling. That their boss or their colleagues or customers or any number of other…