Intangible Capital – Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization

Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization by Mary Adams and Michael Oleksak

Over the years we have reviewed over 70 business books in Trekking. So I hope you will forgive me for sharing the story of our new book this month.

Actually, the story starts twenty years ago, when my wife and business partner, Mary Adams, and I collaborated to write Beisbol: Latin American and the Grand Old Game. Living in Latin America, we saw the influx of Latino players into US baseball and realized nobody had ever researched the history to explain what happened and why. So we did.

The wave of Latin American baseball was a trend that we observed and felt we had to share.  Same with intangible capital.  Through our consulting business over the last ten years or so, we have seen the movement from the industrial age to the knowledge age accelerate. The inability of current accounting standards to keep up with this shift means that a recent look at the S&P 500 market value revealed that market value exceeded the book value of its component companies by 70%.  Additionally, Ernst & Young data from 2007 showed 50% of the value of all mergers was assigned to goodwill and another 20% to other intangible assets. Intangibles are clearly an important factor in how businesses grow today.

So we felt compelled to write Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization.   We would really like to hear feedback on the book from Trekking readers and will post feedback as we get it.  This month, we’ll let you write the review.