“A month ago, in “Reputations and Bottom Lines”, I mentioned the publication of Mary Adams’ and Michael Oleksak’s new book Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st-Century Organization. A copy of this little tome has now arrived in my letterbox and I’ve had a chance to leaf through it.

It’s much more fun to read than the rather solemn title suggests, combining strands of history, economics, management, metaphor and common sense, personal experience and anecdote. It’s also a monument to the metamorphosis of management and asset management philosophies from the age of bricks and mortar to the world of the internet. It won’t provide the answers to all your questions (how many books of 150 pages do?) but it gets the reader into the mindset for asking the right questions. Since the right answers are (i) business-specific and (ii) change in time, while the right questions can be applied more generally and are less subject to the vicissitudes of commercial fashion, this is altogether a greater benefit to the reader.”

Chip Heath and Dan Heath wrote the best seller Made to Stick about how to connect with ideas in 2007.

In this new work, the authors address the topic of change and the mental and emotional obstacles to achieving it.  Using a series of examples gleaned from behavioral change specialists, to the corporate world to Alcohol Anonymous, the Heaths provide a number of common sense, yet thought-provoking techniques.

The brothers use the unique vehicles of describing the logical and emotional sides of making a change as the rider and the elephant. The rider, representing logic, is responsible for planning and direction.  The rider must coordinate with the elephant, that is responsible for the energy to get tasks (change) done.

The brothers break down the change process in a very manageable way: find the bright spots to pattern the effort after, script exact and achievable steps toward the goal, and motivate people as progress is made toward goals.  It’s an effective approach to a difficult topic.

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.

As a follow-up to this tome, Rob, through Pepperdine University, authorized a survey of banks, asset-based lenders, mezzanine, private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, business owners and other capital providers. The purpose of the survey was to understand the true cost of capital in the private business world, a heretofore little examined area.  He will reveal and analyze the results of this survey at the Alliance of Merger & Acquisition Advisors Summer Conference on July 20 at the Chicago Hilton.

An outbound model where you publish ads, call people and send out emails with the intention of selling something

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You don’t believe it? Well, here at Trek we have recently closed on an engagement with a company that found us in just this way. It’s happening, and we all need to start learning about it.  This book is a very practical first step.