Intellectual Capital and Reintro -- Hank Jonas LO7961

Jonas, Harry S (JonasHS@corning.com)
Wed, 19 Jun 1996 11:18:00 -0400 (EDT)

Replying to LO7929 --

Rick replied to Keith:

>[Host's Note:... For what it's worth, there are 1800 email
>subscribers to LO and a couple hundred more reading on the Web. A total
>of 500 have ever posted a msg, almost 300 have introduced themselves.
>...Rick]

I've been a semi-lurker but have contributed in small amounts in the past,
so based on Rick's comment, I though I'd come out of hiding.
The subject is intellectual capital. Fortune magazine did an article on it
in 1994 and there was a lot of interest in the concept, particularly in some
U.S. companies, and others in Canada and Sweden. The topic has several
meanings, from intellectual property rights to programs for assuring
retention of human capital.
Some colleagues and I spent a lot of time talking about it and decided to
focus on the human capital aspect. We formulated an action research project
focused on retention strategies for companies who have identified their "key
contributors," defined as primarily as professional (not managerial)
contributors.
At the time, we recognized some values incongruities by offering to help
companies develop sophisticated retention and reward approaches for a very
small subset of employees, to the possible exclusion of the masses. Yet, we
were curious about the extent companies would be willing to be creative
around retention strategies in this age of downsizings, etc. and hoped that
by focusing first on where companies had energy ("valued creators"), it
would spill over to larger populations of employees (admittedly, our version
of "trickle-down" human resources).
We spent a lot of time marketing the concept through some pretty good
channels to a variety of companies, but with no luck. We went to several
conferences held on the subject (with people supposedly focused on the
topic) and pitched our approach there, with similar non-results. We even
offered to pilot the program at virtually no cost. Our approach was not to
do a "hard sell," but to let the project sell itself based on internal
energy within the companies. Still, a deafening non-response.
I'm happy to send any readers copies of our proposal, but my real questions
are:
- Is intellectual capital still a lively topic, or just a passing fad
(shades of "Is LO a passing fad?")? If the latter, what have we learned (if
anything) by dabbling in this area?
- If companies are still talking about it, have they developed any creative,
data-based retention strategies for their "value creators"? Have these
strategies generalized to larger populations?
- Are the value incongruities mentioned above issues in the further
development of the intellectual capital concept? What have we missed?

-- 

"Jonas, Harry S" <JonasHS@corning.com>

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>