Intellectual Capital LO8109

David J. Skyrme (david@pop3.hiway.co.uk)
Tue, 25 Jun 1996 21:23:40 +0100

Replying to LO7961 -- was "Intellectual Capital and Reintro -- Hank Jonas"
[Subject line shortened by your host...]

Sorry for this late reply but Hank asks some highly pertinent questions,
and I would like to suggest a possible causes of his frustration

- Is intellectual capital still a lively topic, or just a passing fad It
seems to be real, but is often expressed in other terms. Capability
planning is one approach I have come across. It is certainly not well
understood or measured IMHO.

- 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? Increasingy I
think companies are trying to lock their intellectual capital into teams
and into their processes and structures. The loss of an individual then
has less of an impact. In fact in a good learning organisation, the team
can carry on as if nothing had happened. I got some sense of this when
last year I sat in a presentation and saw some overheads I had generated 3
years previously. But for the presenter they were company knowledge and
had no idea of their origin. On the other hand individual 'stars' are
often noticed and earmarked in company succession planning sessions (or
sometimes by power hungry bosses as people to trip up!)

- Are the value incongruities mentioned above issues in the further
development of the intellectual capital concept? What have we missed? I
suspect what you have missed, though its difficult to do a tele-diagnosis,
is the fact that the LO, intellectual capital language is some 180 degrees
out of shift of where practicing managers are thinking. You therefore need
some translators to create a corkscrew - moving through 180 degrees at say
30 to 45 degrees at a time, so they buy your message. Finding these
intermediaries who translate and link is often the breakthrough for
powerful but unappreciated concepts

David J. Skyrme
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David J. Skyrme Tel/Fax: +44 1635 551434
David Skyrme Associates Limited Newbury, Berks, England
a member of the ENTOVATION Network
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-- 

david@pop3.hiway.co.uk (David J. Skyrme)

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