Five Reasons Your Organization Should Assess Its Intangibles
In posts over the past weeks, I have already shown you some simple but powerful ways of generating concrete information about your intangibles. The first is generating an inventory of key knowledge assets. The second is building a graphic or model that serves as a shared visualization of how your company combines and monetizes those [...]
The Role of a Manager in the Knowledge Era
In the knowledge era, the ability to access and leverage knowledge for competitive advantage is critical to corporate success. But knowledge is rarely concentrated at the top of organizations. There is still a need for top-down communication and direction but this must be balanced with knowledge flows from the bottom up and the outside in [...]
How Many Workers Are Knowledge Workers?
The change in the American workforce has been evolving slowly over the past century. Over this time, the dominant jobs have shifted from materials extraction and processing to information processing. The trend was constant and consistent over the century for the primary and tertiary sectors. The secondary sector actually peaked at 50% in 1960 and [...]
What is a Knowledge Worker?
The reason orchestration has become an important management concept is the rise of the knowledge era and the knowledge worker. The essence of what knowledge workers do can be summed up in two words: they think. Here are a few more: They use their judgment. They apply their experience. They make decisions about what to [...]
Horizontal or Vertical: two views of the organization—which is right?
One image that we have used over and over again in recent years to explain the managerial implications of the knowledge era is depicted in this graphic. It is an abstraction of theorganization chart. Like an organization chart, the triangular figure is widerat the bottom where there are more people at the bottom working in [...]
The Superpower of the Knowledge Era: Process
Process is not new to business. In fact, process in the form of production lines was a critical driver of the growth of the industrial economy. In a factory, you could see the physical movement of raw material as it moved from the warehouse into a series of production lines with finished goods coming out [...]
Relationship Capital, Starting With Your Customers
As with human capital, relationship capital has always been a part of business. Organizations have always had customers, vendors and financing partners, to name a few. But the nature of these relationships has been changing more dramatically in recent years. First of all, networking technology has made it easier to outsource pieces of a business [...]
The Two Families of Organizational Assets in a Knowledge-Era Organization
As we move through this chapter and really the rest of the book, there is a distinction we want to make about the organization of businesses. It is inspired by the Value Chain graphic created by Michael Porter back in 1985. This simple graphic is a great illustration of the generic business model for the [...]
Knowledge is the New Oil
—OilIt is hard to imagine the tangible economy without oil. It fuels our cars and trucks. It generates electricity to power our factories and homes. It serves as a raw material for products we use everyday, from plastics to fabrics, fertilizers, and high tech materials. These many uses for oil have made this commodity a [...]
Three Ways to Adapt Your Organization to the Knowledge Era
The knowledge era is here to stay. But most organizations have not yet completely caught up with this seismic shift. In our new book Intangible Capital, we address three ways to think about adapting your organization: The New Factory focuses on the performance of your intangible capital. The New Management is about driving innovation in [...]
