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Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations - Softcover

Stewart, Thomas A.

 
9780385483810: Intellectual Capital: The New Wealth of Organizations
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385483813 ISBN 13: 9780385483810
Verlag: Crown Pub, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Shows corporate managers how to find, develop, and use their employees' specialized knowledge and skills to improve their products and procedures, offering examples of the intellectual capital revolution sweeping America's corporations today

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Thomas A. Stewart is an award-winning member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine. He pioneered the field of intellectual capital in a series of landmark articles that earned him an international reputation as the chief expert on the subject. The Planning Forum called him "the leading proponent of knowledge management in the business press," and Business Intelligence, a British research group, gave him a special award for his outstanding contributions to the field. He lives in Manhattan.

Aus dem Klappentext

Visionary in scope, Intellectual Capital is the first book that shows how to turn the untapped knowledge of an organization into its greatest competitive weapon. Thomas A. Stewart demonstrates how knowledge--not natural resources, machinery, or financial capital--has become the most important factor in economic life. Through practical advice, stories, and case histories, Stewart reveals how organizations and individuals can create and use the knowledge assets they need. Dazzling in its ability to make conceptual sense of the economic revolution we are living through, this ingenious book cuts through the vague rhetoric of "paradigm shifts" to show how the Information Age economy really works.

Intellectual Capital should be read as if the futures of your company and your career depend on it. They do.

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Preface to the Paperback Edition

In October 1994, I spoke about intellectual capital at the first of what has become a series of conferences called "The Knowledge Advantage," sponsored by the Strategic Leadership Forum and Ernst & Young.  During a question period following my talk, someone asked, "Do you think this stuff will become a fad like reengineering?"

"I don't think so," I confidently answered.  "There's nothing to sell." The management of intellectual capital--organized knowledge that can be used to produce wealth--didn't seem to lend itself to being packaged and sold.  So long as no one had a commercial reason to push the idea, I figured it would not be pushed too far.

So much for my crystal ball.  The response to the publication of Intellectual Capital--more accurately, the response to the ideas it discusses--has been far greater than I could have imagined.  As the year's crop of annual reports showed up in my mailbox in the spring of 1998, a bit more than a year after the first publication of this book, I found the phrase "intellectual capital" in one glossy document after another.  I have received letters, phone calls, and e-mail from every continent except Antarctica.  Both the World Economic Forum, whose principal constituents are big companies from advanced economies, and the World Bank, whose principal clients are the least-developed nations, have taken up intellectual capital as major themes of their work.  In advertisements in The Economist, Slovakia touts its intellectual capital as a reason for businesses to invest there.  For the government of Peru, it became a focus of a 1998 National Competitiveness Summit; for the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C., it is the subject of a major study group; in company after company--banks in Australia, technology companies in Silicon Valley, chemical companies in Europe--managing intellectual capital has become a prominent subject of both conversation and action.  And on Dilbert's Web site (at http://umweb2.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/career/bin/ms2.cgi), "intellectual capital" has become one of the phrases that pops up in Scott Adams's random "mission statement generator."

I don't mean to claim credit (or accept blame) for anything other than having unfurled a sail in time to catch a wind--as others also have.  But it's quite a wind.  If companies handle it well and aren't blown off course, they will, I am more convinced than ever, find themselves propelled to new lands, rich with unexpected opportunities.  Certainly the trends described in Part One, "The Information Age," have in this very short time grown much, much stronger.  In April 1998, the U.S.  Department of Commerce published a superb report, The Emerging Digital Economy by Lynn Margherio (available at www.ecommerce.gov or from the Government Printing Office in Washington), that irrefutably and dramatically updates the discussion in Part One, showing that knowledge continues to increase its dominant or defining role in national output, corporate competitive advantage, and labor markets.  Intellectual assets continue to displace physical and financial capital as factors of production.  Overall, McKinsey consultant Lowell Bryan has estimated, U.S.  companies today require 20 percent less in the way of tangible assets to produce a dollar's worth of sales than they did a genedefining role ration ago.  The same is true for working capital as the substitution of information for inventory continues unabated.  (See Chapter 2.) Not that "old economy"
assets don't matter--they do and in many industries always will.  But the relative importance of intellectual capital continues to grow, in the economy as a whole and in every company I can think of, and in most cases it is now knowledge that gives one company an advantage over another, rather than, say, physical scale or scope.

No wonder competition for intellectual capital has heated up.  Part Two of this book describes the three broad categories in which intellectual capital can be placed--human capital, structural (or organizational) capital, and customer capital.  Competition has become keener for all three.  Human capital is especially prized--and, as always, especially mismanaged.  Part of the intense demand for talent in the United States can be ascribed to a long-running economic boom that (at this writing) has cut unemployment to historically low levels.  But is it just the boom? Economist Paul Krugman, warning against American economic triumphalism and remembering the gloomsayers of the late 1980s, warns us not to mistake a cycle for a trend.  Certainly unemployment will rise again one day.  Surely it is to the cycle that one can attribute the frothiest excesses of late-1990s American labor markets, where cocky young technical workers treat a company as if it existed to cater to them--and it meekly acquiesces--and where an ordinarily xenophobic Congress votes to lower immigration barriers for some skilled workers.

But there also are trends, structural changes, that deepen the demand and raise the rewards for knowledge work not just in the United States but also in countries such as France and Germany that struggle with high unemployment.  The knowledge economy demands skills many workers simply do not have; and of almost all workers, it demands flexibility, alertness, and the ability to make decisions without consulting a manual or a foreman.  Lynn Margherio writes: "Jobs characterized by a transfer of information from one party to another--travel agents, insurance agents, stock brokers, customer service representatives--will likely see routine tasks like order taking disappear, and more complicated tasks replacing them." The best workers are always most in demand; now they are so much at a premium that more and more of them choose to work on their own, for profit rather than a wage.  Egalitarian labor markets, such as those of Western Europe and Japan, have begun to break with long-held, socially dear traditions of compensation and governance in order to reward and manage knowledge workers as the Information Age demands.  Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft, says, "The war for talent gets tougher and tougher."

Companies have begun to take their customer capital seriously, too, to view it and manage it as the asset it is.  Among many examples is Westpac, one of Australia's biggest banks, where the management of customer capital has become a principal means by which the bank is struggling back (successfully so far) from a near-death experience earlier in the decade.  Chapter 9 cites a study of U.S.  banks that showed that only three of five retail customers are profitable.  On the commercial side, Westpac was doing less well even than that.  (The bank won't reveal precisely what percentage was unprofitable.) Westpac undertook a systematic evaluation of its customer base, first assessing each customer relationship to see if it was profitable (including a charge for the cost of capital), then looking more closely to see if it was profitable in some areas of its relationships (say, commercial loans) but not in others (foreign exchange, perhaps).  Unprofitable customers weren't jettisoned, except rarely.  Instead the bank set up ways to work with them to find ways to add value to the relationship.  Usually the way to do that has been by selling knowledge--that is, the bank's...

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Verlag
Crown Pub
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385483813
ISBN 13 
9780385483810
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
288
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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