the trouble with banks – a different approach
So what’s the answer for SME businesses? Up your game if you need to borrow. We are finding good reception with bankers for specific, data-driven descriptions of intangibles. 80% of the value of the average company today is intangible. Most bankers and businesspeople understand this intuitively but they often don’t have the information to tie value and intangibles together.
Reputation: beyond shareholder thinking to stakeholder thinking and back again
When we talk about the core intangible capital of an organization, we spend most of our time focusing on the intangibles that drive customer value creation and revenue generation. This is a helpful perspective for operational performance and strategies. In this view, relationship capital focuses on the partners that help support your business model: your [...]
Intangibles, the Bottom Line and Shareholder Value
U.S. business culture is very much about results. Two of the ideas that best capture this perspective are the concepts of the “bottom line” and “shareholder value.” The bottom line is a financial calculation. As we have made clear throughout this book, the integrity of financial statements that are used to calculate the profit or [...]
Reputation Is the New Bottom Line
In both the tangible and the intangible economy, the ultimate metric for all companies is and will be their ability to generate profits—a strong bottom line. Profits and the cash they provide ensure an organization’s survival. But in the knowledge economy, it is no longer enough to just produce a strong bottom line.
The Emperor Has No Clothes and why we still have not addressed the intangible information gap
One of the most graphic depictions of the shift from the industrial to the knowledge economy can be seen in this graph prepared by Ocean Tomo a number of years ago (here’s a larger version). The top line is total corporate value of the companies in the S&P 500. The gray band at the bottom [...]
Triangulation – Getting a complete picture of your intangibles
Once you have a full set of data about your intangibles, how should you use it? We like to use the image of triangulation seen here as a way of explaining how you can use the three kinds of data that we have described to come up with a unified measurement of your intangibles. Triangulation [...]
KPI Fever: Beware Magic Metrics
Every company I visit these days is talking key performance indicators (KPI’s). This tells me that people understand that financial metrics aren’t (and never have been) enough to measure organizational success. But I worry about how using the shorthand KPI for all non-financial measurement could doom companies’ efforts from the start. The problem is the [...]
If not the IC-IQ quiz, here’s another quiz
The Intangible Capital quiz IC.IQ can be powerful and a great way to quickly get at what’s going on in a business. It tells you what the financials and all the “hard” data have ignored.
“Hey, look, a quiz!” – your IC
If you are a C-level executive of a company, or if you’d like to be one but don’t know enough about intangible capital to get there, take this simple 22-question IC.IQ quiz.
Why are you creating your measurement management system – and do you really need a balanced scorecard?
A few years ago, I read an article by Ian Graham called, What’s Wrong with Targets? Graham made the case that setting targets or goals for employees creates the wrong kind of behavior. This is because it focuses the employee on the target rather than on the underlying processes that create value for customers and [...]
