Member Blogs

I was honored to be invited to the intangibles policy conference late last year in DC organized by MIT as part of the on-going project at the OECD. The presentations are now available on line.

One opening note: the OECD has shifted away from talking about intangible capital and now calls it knowledge-based capital (KBC).  Even though I wrote a book called Intangible Capital, I’m sympathetic to the dilemma. Vocabulary is still an issue in our field. Not sure that KBC is that much of an improvement but you better add KBC to your glossary and move on to the substance.  Because the basic ideas are not in question. KBC/IA/IC are the dominant drivers of our economies and our companies today. So let’s just keep trying to build the field.

This conference provided a lot of good new perspectives to our collective discussion. It also brought a number of new people into the conversation.  The format of this conference was panels of three or so academics discussing different facets of the field including:

• Corporate Reporting and National Accounts
• Ownership and Capital
• Digitization
• Human Capital
• Intellectual Property
• Taxation

For those of you who notice these things, you can't have a conference on this topic and not address the many facets of intangibles. Although they didn't use the IC framework, the discussions hit on all four categories of human, relationship, structural and strategic capital.

This was primarily a policy conference but there’s a lot here for businesspeople too. The webpage for the conference has most of the slide decks used by the speakers.  A few highlights include Andy Updegrove on standards, Carol Corrado (a leader in thinking about economic measures) on future data needs and Michael Mandel suggesting that data is a new category of goods (as in products+services+data).

There’s a related conference in Paris in February. If you go, please let us know what you learn.

I happened to be talking on the phone today with my son (a collage junior) about letters he needed to get out for summer internships. While we were talking, I received the periodic update email that LinkedIn sends out (yes, I was multi-tasking…).

The headline on the email told me that my son had added a new job to his profile, the internship he completed in Shanghai last month. I laughed and told him I was going to click through to get the latest news on him. Once I clicked, LinkedIn prompted me to endorse his skills. Hmm, I said, don’t think an endorsement from your mother is all that valuable.

He said that he wasn’t sure he liked this endorsement thing anyway. I replied that he should like it because it was the kind of thing we are doing in our new company. Our ICounts Graph is a corporate version of this—giving names and structure to the intangible side of business. The LinkedIn Endorsement is naming your personal skills and expertise and then measuring it by how many people (and who) endorse you. And, no your mother doesn’t count. But the sum total of it becomes an economic graph of your professional skills.

Then he started to get it. He told that that he had been flattered when the high school faculty advisor from Model Congress had endorsed his leadership and public speaking skills. Others had done the same. I said imagine how it will look when the people that you approach about an internship check out your profile. And think how strong your resume will be over time as different people give weight to the storyline of your career.

If you get this concept, start thinking about what would happen if your customers and suppliers and partners and community created an economic graph of your company’s intangibles?  All of a sudden, it would be clear to everyone (inside and outside your company) how you are doing and what your potential is. This may sound scary at first but it's inevitable. And, if you do a good job, all of a sudden your efforts will be visible. You can say to customers and bankers and investors and potential partners and employees, "Yes, this is who we are and we want you to be part of it."

That’s what we’re doing over at Smarter-Companies. Hope you'll join us!

Most people view social technologies as a means of marketing. And, while they are indeed a very powerful way to market, there’s a lot more to the what's going on in the Social Era.

For marketers (and managers in general), social technologies create the possibility for two-way conversations with your customers and stakeholders that can’t be duplicated by any traditional, one-way medium. Companies can talk about what’s important to them in a way that is (hopefully) meaningful for their customers. And they can listen what’s important to their customers. This is especially valuable when there is a problem. A quick reaction to customers when they have a problem or a criticism can prevent one of the social media crises that every manager dreads.

This kind of conversation is primarily handled by marketing people. But it’s dangerous to just view social as a marketing strategy. To show you what I mean, I would like to refer you to the game of Whack-A-Mole. This is an arcade game where you stand with a hammer and have to pound down little “moles” who live under ground and pop out unexpectedly in different places on the game board. The faster you react to the mole popping up, the better your score.

A great marketer is actively listening so that every “mole” in your backyard can be quickly dealt with. The marketer will hear the minute there is a problem and hopefully solve it. And the marketer that’s listening carefully can see problems developing in their early stages.

But even a great marketer isn’t in a position to anticipate where the next mole is going to pop. That’s really the job of the larger management team. What are you doing right or wrong? Where is your organization vulnerable to problems? Don't leave marketing to deal with the consequence. Anticipate them.

One of the challenges is that the drivers of success of companies today are, like our friends the moles, hidden from sight. Today 80% of the value of the average company is intangible. This means that the people, knowledge, processes, relationships and culture that drive success are outside of traditional accounting and management systems. Most people manage intangibles intuitively and lack even basic information about them. And if you aren’t watching these intangibles, the only time you see them is when a problem pops up unexpectedly.

That’s why smarter companies take a more holistic approach to management. They understand the unique intangibles driving their success. And they have concrete information about all the intangibles—the things they do and how they do it. Smarter companies find ways to track the moles while they are still underground, anticipate their moves or prevent them from even entering their yard.

Are you ready to move beyond Whack-A-Mole management? Get started using our open source index and inventory tools. And let us know how many moles you find before they have time to become a problem.

It happens all the time. I’ll meet someone new and I’ll tell them that I’m interested (OK, some would say obsessed:) with intangible assets. Most people immediately nod their head and agree how important they are. But then, we quickly get into blind man territory.

I’m talking about the poem about the Blind Men and the Elephant adapted from the Indian parable (this depiction of the blind men was prepared by Collective Next at an OECD intangible conference last year).

In the poem, each blind man feels a different part of the elephant (legs, tail, ears, etc) and draws very different conclusions about what the whole elephant would look like.

That’s what happens to all of us when we discuss intangibles. There are lots of different aspects of intangibles. And many experts on some or all of these aspects. While we need all these experts and points of view to build successful smarter companies, we get into trouble if experts can’t also see the big picture.

The graphic we have been using on our site lately gives you a sense of this variety (and this just names a few of the areas of expertise necessary to build smarter companies):

What I am trying to say that if we see intangibles as just people or just intellectual property or just customers or just goodwill, then we are missing the point. IC can and must be understood as a dynamic system characterized by constant learning, adaptation and innovation. No one in business today can afford to think in silos.

This perspective also helps us make sense of how the Social Era is so dramatically different from the Industrial Era. When you are managing machines, you need a hierarchical, siloed organization that optimizes its own piece. When you are managing minds, you need a networked, interactive organization that optimizes the system.

Without this holistic view of an organization, we are all blind men working at cross purposes to each other. That’s the message of our new community at smarter-companies: Together we are smarter. Together we can unleash the enormous untapped potential hidden inside every organization.  Join us on our mission to build smarter companies!

As the year wound down, Boston Business Journal published a great list of the 10 worst social media mistakes brands made in 2012.

As I read them, I saw a huge difference between the implications (and lessons to be learned) from these mistakes. In my mind, the mistakes fell into two categories:

Bad Marketing: The first I would call bad marketing mistakes. 6 of the 10 fell into this category. They included things like:

• Chef Marc Orfaly, who unloaded an expletive-laced rant on an unhappy customer who posted her review of her Thanksgiving dinner at Orfaly’s Boston restaurant
• Gap tweeting "All impacted by #Sandy, stay safe! We'll be doing lots of Gap.com shopping today. How about you?"

These bad marketing mistakes can be attributed to an ill-considered statement by one person. These can usually be prevented just by making sure that you have good marketing people and a culture and a process to think before you hit send.

Bad Management: This second category are the really scary ones. These are mistakes that are caused by systemic problems happening far away from the marketing department. Here are the four mistakes highlighted in the BBJ article that fall into this category:

• The tweet that went viral: "My sister paid Progressive Insurance to defend her killer in court"
• Starbucks' #spreadthecheer hashtag campaign backfiring in the United Kingdom, where users hijacked the hashtag and tweeted out negative, sometimes expletive-laced tweets about the chain's workplace practices
• #McDStories hashtag. People were supposed to share positive stories about McDonald's. Unfortunately for the burger chain, people began sharing some very unappetizing stories
• Boloco CEO John Pepper alerting 50,000 email subscribers that the chain planned to keep its restaurants open for business during Hurricane Sandy. Angry tweets and emails immediately started pouring in, criticizing Boloco for potentially putting employees in harm's way.

These aren’t social media marketing mistakes. They are Social Era management failures. These are the kind of failures that should keep every leader up at night. And they are a clear harbinger of the dramatic changes to come.

Social technologies empower your customers, your stakeholders and your employees. They move the conversation away from branding where you get to say who you are to a conversation about what you do. Social means (among other things) that your actions can become part of a public conversation. And actions, as my mother always said, speak louder than words. Scary right?

So what’s the answer? The last chapter of our book Intangible Capital is entitled Reputation is the New Bottom Line. In it, we make the case that reputation is the metric that determines your ability to make profits. Starting a new year as we are this week, I submit that your reputation will be much more important to your performance in the coming year than your earnings last year.

What drives reputation? Your intangible assets. Your people, your culture, your shared knowledge, your partnerships, your business model. It’s what you do and how you do it. These intangibles are very real economic assets. And they’re actually easy to inventory and measure. And, if you want to avoid the second category of “social media” mistakes, you better start paying attention to the intangibles.

(update; as of November 2012, The Monitor Group headed by Michael E. Porter, the subject of this article, declared bankruptcy ending an era of C-Suite omnipotence strategy thinking.  This article compares competitive strategy to collaborative strategy)

***

The B-School staple "Porter’s 5 Forces" has been the mainstay of corporate competitive analysis since it’s creation in 1979 by World regarded Harvard Business School Professor, Michael E. Porter. Porter developed a model of industry analysis in his seminal book,  Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors. 

In short, a competitive company’s position in a market is threatened by five main forces acting on the corporate asset:

• new competition,
• substitute products or services,
• bargaining power of customers,
• bargaining power of suppliers,
• intensity of competitive rivalries.

Any changes in these 5 forces would be cause for the company to re-evaluate their place in the market ... thus leading to healthy consulting practices for strategists the world over.

The Rate of Change

In the 1990’s critics began to argue that Porter’s 5 Forces thesis assumes that the forces are static and non-related.  At the time, the world was becoming more dynamic and more interrelated. For example:

• Buyers, competitors, and suppliers can interact, and even collude.
• Value cannot be created in the long run by constantly introducing barriers to entry
• Participants in a market have the ability to plan and respond to competitive behavior.

As a result, they added another Force called “complementors” while introducing rudimentary game theory to explain the role of strategic alliances to the analysis.

Constant Change

Now in the year 2012, we routinely assume that all players can instantaneously access the same real-time dynamic market information from the cloud.  We readily accept that all players will collaborate massively with whomever they want from anywhere in the World.  As a result, we must assume that all five forces will change constantly and rapidly in real time.

Now imagine how 1990’s game theory would manage conditions where the company AND their competitors must continuously re-evaluate their position in a market under the circumstances of continuous change.  In effect, nobody has the ability to compete with each other, they are competing with the game, therefore, they are cooperating to keep the game in play.

Is Collaboration Underrated?

If any player tries to introduce a barrier to entry, THEY risk get knocked out while the game continues without them. In fact, value is created by applications that remove barriers ... and brokers are punished. All of these factors cause the game to self energize and improve as players preserve the asset rather than consume it.

The Value Game

It should not be surprising therefore that Porter’s 5 forces now resemble what we call the Value Game that we have described here (and here, and here).  In the ultimate manifestation, however, The Value Game will play automatically through multiagent algorithmic game applications where tangible and intangible assets would be accounted equally in a Value Game. Individual would own, manage, and deploy their secret sauce of knowledge assets through their personal API that interfaces with the game that is most relevant to their highest abilities.

Where competition has met it's match

Remember that little regarded fact of Capitalism: Markets are efficient where there is perfect information.  This means that if everyone involved in a transaction has the exact same information as everyone else, the true supply can meet the true demand.  Nobody ever said that this must be accomplished through competition especially if collaboration can do it better.

For many years I have had a great interest (some would say obsession!) about the role of intangible capital in the growth and competitiveness of companies. With the help of my colleagues, our clients and our broad network, we worked to develop  tools and methodologies to support this thinking. And we created this web community to share our learnings because we felt strongly that one person or one company could never have all the answers. Until now, the community was known as the IC Knowledge Center. Today, I am announcing a new future for our community with the re-launching of the site as smarter-companies. 

This new site will be designed around our existing community. To date, we have attracted an international audience. 60% of you are consultants. 20% are academics (many of whom also consult). The remainder includes attorneys, companies, non-profits, governments and solutions providers. Your areas of specialization include intellectual/intangible capital, knowledge management, human capital, innovation, finance, information technology, marketing, performance management and intellectual property.

In short, our community is like a map of the intangible capital of the organizations we serve. Yet the potential of our community’s IC, like that of many organizations, has not been fully developed. That’s why we’ve made the decision to re-name the community and create a business model around it.

Going forward, at smarter-companies, we will be offering the products and methodologies that we’ve developed over the last seven years (some as open source and some as paid products) under the ICounts name. But we hope that our products will be surrounded by products from other consultants and service providers. Our goal is for the smarter-companies site to become a place of continuous learning about how to create smarter companies—and also a marketplace of solutions that help consultants and companies apply that learning.

As we enter 2013, allow me to share my belief in a bright future. The ultimate message of intangible capital is that we share collective knowledge, much of it untapped, that has the potential to conquer the challenges facing the world and create profitable, sustainable businesses fueled by the power of people, communities and social technologies.

I hope you will join us on this journey,  Mary Adams

Pleased to publish here at ICKC, an IBCM© Research Presentation.

All Investment decisions shall necessarily be on the basis of Intangible Value Capital. Intangible facilitates converting a n-dimensional problem into n problems of one dimension. The subject - object distinction of Quantitative and Qualitative elements converge into a single metrics of energy force - Intangible.

Risk Appetite and Risk Culture, verily go abegging for Banking and Finance need necessarily be measured by Intangible. IIF Report on Banking elaborately describes the same with many a principle and recommendation but fails to converge into a single metrics on account of disparate object characteristics. That's the power of Intangible that can bring forth Enterprise Resource Control, effectively.

Calling upon the members of ICKC to collaborate with IBCM© Research on a number of initiatives. The one below is a slide presentation on Mandatory Grading for IPOs introduced by SEBI (Securities Exchange Board of India) but rendered ineffective by Rating Agencies. Letter reference to SEBI can be found herein.

Corporates should develop an in-house Intangible Value Capital system within without depending on Rating Agencies who have no capability to value the Intangible actions.

I welcome your comments.

[slideshare id=14219579&doc=diy-corporate-rating-120908213523-phpapp01]

Salient Points:

1. IBCM© Research helps systematic development of Corporate Knowledge Database of Intangible Corporate Action crucial for Enterprise Resource Controls, hitherto not possible.

2. PE Investors or Banks decide based on inadequate data and no measured knowledge of the calibre of management. Regulators enter after the damage is done. IBCM© Research Corporate Rating corrects the lacuna by its unique 'due diligence' capabilities.

3. Untapped energy source by each building-block of just a set of 5 KPIs that IBCM© Research identifies as the energy waiting to happen - Tap it, productivity explodes.

4. Corporate Rating by each building-block to National grid of Corporate Rating is made possible by Intangible as zero once energised the theory of numbers.

5. Society is the greatest power source for Corporates from seeking funds for growth to market products. CSR is a built-in resource provider in every building block of a company, that IBCM© Research integrates into the atomic structure of management.

6. SEBI's introduction of Mandatory Grading for IPOs was indeed a challenging phenomenon. Using the same criteria would put forth the companies futuristic, by Corporate Rating. Link to know more of letter to SEBI - http://wp.me/p18MVb-fW

7. Easily extrapolate industry to National grid of Governance. Bangladesh or Greece or India or China or any country, will be better served by rating their Intangible Value Capital, for it derives a rating reflecting the hidden but unused power of energy force.

8. Not economic analysis but Intangible Value Capital, be it Corporate or Government that would be the deciding factor for any investments. "Due diligence' reports by Intangible Value Capital ensure sustainability of efficiency, values and profits. 

9. DIY for Intangible Value Capital is a Balance Sheet of strategies you can refer and keep track anytime. M&A strategies that history proves of failures as mismatch of value system need measurement of Intangible Value Capital of the partners before acquisition for growth. The catchword is sustainability of values.

10. DIY - Corporate Rating - CSR integrated - by IBCM© Research is unique in the world of management, derived by Intangible. 

11. IBCM© Research integrates Tangible results with Intangible action plan keeping track of accomplishments on Real-time.

A few tweets:

1. Corporates reporting system must be  based on  ratings of Qualitative elements. Jump out of GRI and GAAP. Know thy power.

2. Rating agencies shd comprehend a way to measure Qualitative elements. They remain not just unreliable but misleading

3. Investment decisions w/o Qualitative elements being rated r responsible for today's economic woes. 

DIY for Intangible Value Capital Knowledge Base.

Jayaraman Rajah Iyer

The 8th World Conference on Intellectual Capital for communities organised by the Universite Paris Sud and the New Club of Paris, hosted at the World Bank offices in Paris, took place on 31 May/1 June 2012. The guest country this year was Korea. All videos and presentations are now available through this URL http://www.chairedelimmateriel.u-psud.fr/tiki-read_article.php?articleId=34 

The conference theme this year was "Open Innovation, Knowledge Flow, and the New Innovation policy agenda". This IC conference is one of the best events bringing together people working on intangibles in government, business and academia. 

In a recent article on ICKC, the following definition was given to Strategic Capital:

Strategic Capital – This is a category that is not always included in academic definitions of IC. However, in our experience, this category of knowledge is the necessary complement to the others. It includes all the knowledge you have of your market and the business model that you have created to connect with market needs.

http://www.i-capitaladvisors.com/ic-basics/i-capital/

What puzzles me is whether this represents a fourth kind of IC,  or whether it is more the overlap of the other three.

In that view, what makes Strat-C is the space in which the other three overlap in the service of the specified goal.

One might therefore have Human C, Structural C, Relationship C that exist in your firm but have no role in achieving strategy and are therefore excluded in the set of what makes Strategic C.

Any thoughts?

Web Seminar ‘New Generation Intangibles’

IPR Plaza hosts a series of web seminars on intangibles topics presented by IP professionals. Just like all other information on www.iprplaza.com, these so-called ‘webinars’ are free-of-charge.

Our first webinar will take place in June, with the following topic:

New generation intangibles – a transfer pricing perspective for MNCs

Today, there is a new generation of intangibles. They come in many shapes and sizes and almost all are triggered by companies with new types of business models and are configured in a significantly different way compared to their competitors.

The upcoming webinar will focus on a transfer pricing approach to these ‘new generation intangibles’ for multinational companies (MNCs) in particular. So, if you are interested, then do not pass up on the opportunity to hear the following IP professionals shed their light on the subject.     

Presenters:

-          Steven Carey: Partner, Transfer Pricing Associates, Hong Kong 

www.tpa-global.com

-          Vishnu Bagri: Partner, Accretive SDU Consulting, India               

accretiveglobal.com

Date:

Monday, June 11th, 2012

Time:

09:00-10:00, London, UK

10:00-11:00, Amsterdam, Central European Summer Time

13:30-14:30, Mumbai, India

16:00-17:00, Singapore

To register for this free-of-charge web event: click here

Our second webinar topic will be ‘How to value your IP in an international business perspective’, and will be presented by Matthijs Weeink (Investment Consulting Associates) and Sjoerd de Jong (Transfer Pricing Associates). It will take place in the beginning of July. Keep an eye on our event calendar for further details.

About IPR Plaza:

IPR Plaza is a web-based portal that bridges multiple disciplines by providing free-of-charge qualitative and quantitative information on intangibles.  IPR Plaza is empowered by different leading IP advisory firms.  IPR Plaza is headquartered in the Netherlands with representation in other major countries.

Applying strategic precognition?

Streaming and fluttering your intellectual assets?

See how at http://bponline.amcham.gr/?p=1583

The recent issue of the iKnow magazine (March 2012), published by the Bangkok University, analyses different aspects of the Thai Flood Crisis. I have a short article on the intellectual capital perspective of this man-made crisis http://www.se-edmag.com/images/stories/online/iknow/iknow02/index.html#/16/

Investors interest for NPSP Composieten BV relates to IC Rating Report.

NPSP Composieten BV is a composites manufacturer in the Netherlands. In a €800 million domestic market with about 200 companies, NPSP Composieten BV is market leader in manufacturing composites using 85% bio based materials. This is what they call Nature Based Composites: the NABASCO brand they have developed over the last 5 years. Learn more at: http://www.npsp.nl/?IDL=2 

Almost two years ago, i2c delivered an Intellectual Capital Rating™ report based on stakeholder interviews (the extended method developed by Leif Edvinsson and ICAB, Sweden). This report stated the intellectual capital value on NPSP BV focussing on the efficiencies, renewal and risks.

The overall Intellectual Capital score of NPSP Composieten BV was satisfactory, even very good at IP and relational capital. Their main challenge was about experience in the Management Team, protecting their IP and moving towards new branches such as construction through marketing outside their common client groups.

In the Netherlands, today, commercial & investments banks, and even investments funds are criticized of lacking any initiative to support innovative technical and manufacturing companies. But NPSP Composieten BV (Financial Daily, Hans de Jongh, March 16^th 2012) found new investors. Time to find out what precisely happened.  

Wanting to share the success, CEO Willem Bottger, explained. The IC Rating report was part of the complete set of due diligence files. But the report got the attention, and convinced a traditional bank, a business angel and a private equity investor who decided on an investment of 50% of the NPSP Composieten BV turnover of 2011. During the research period of this investment group, questions about the IC report where unfolding realistic growth and development issues that the management team had intervened upon since i2c research team had presented it. Every single risk and learning had been given follow-up. The reliability of the IC report was even after such a long time not questioned, the advantage for the investors with this kind of reporting was clear. As NPSP Composieten BV will grow the coming years, they plan to do a new IC Rating Research when turnover has doubled.

Sailing Novel Gateways? See you at the new race Skipper? MindscapingFreshBeginnings.pdf

Some practical IC Value Creation Tools worth exploring (snatching within, grasping around, seizing beyond).

Sneak into the Fresh Perspective at http://bponline.amcham.gr/?p=1368

Observations from Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea's Maker Faire presentation 9/18/11

• Community markets have bidirectional information flow, a diverse marketplace with increased capacity, and grassroots economics ("Markets are conversations").
• Handmade is characterized by creative inefficiency, as opposed to the current model where production is automated, uniform, and price-focused.
• Teams have 30% more sales than individuals. This reminded me of how scientific collaborations and shared authorship lead to increased publishing rates.

I asked Etsy CTO Kellan Elliot-McCrea how he thought the shift in markets and production would unfold as we move from a manufacturing economy toward community markets and open source, and from information scarcity toward information abundance. He said that overall, it was taking longer than they expected. He has noticed, however, that sellers who share more about their processes tend do better than sellers who don't (lift in sales).

In Aiaf (Association of Italian Financial Analyst) we are the opinion that XBRL language has the technical-operational characteristics to represent in electronic format also the informative contents related to the intangible assets.

The informative structure of XBRL that adopts a specific taxonomy allows to formalize and to codify in a standard method the indicators related to the intangible assets, as well as the relative methods of measurement, classification and aggregation. Uniformity and standardization, would not entirely operate then in technical terms, but potentially in conceptual terms, favouring the harmonization about the disclosure on the intangibles at international level.

To evidence, an efficient elaboration process of the intangible indicators is not able however to put aside from a technical definition of a standard syntax and semantics, and therefore from the contemporary adoption of an evolved electronic language useful for a standardized disclosure.

Nevertheless, the development, definition and harmonization at technical-informative level, with the coding of the intangible assets through suitable tags able to visualize and to communicate the financial and non financial indicators is still in an embryonic level. In fact, the XBRL language provide a syntax for the definition of the formalities through which express the economic-financial results and a semantics for the standardization of a “catalog of measures”.

For the intangible assets the contents of this “catalog” are still however whole to define.

While the XML-based languages are already achieving the technical objective to define a standard syntax and semantics with reference to many indicators and economic-financial measures, with reference to qualitative indicators of the intangible assets several progress still have to be completed to define the nature and it content. In fact, despite in the last years the enterprise disclosure spread on the market and to the infomediaris is sensitively improved, to the investors and the external stakeholders, the objective has not been reached yet neither to define a standard methodology of measurement, neither to define a specific business reporting in which a standard list of intangible indicators of performance is introduced, specific for every industry sector, approved and applied by a suitable critical mass of companies.

The mentioned problem remains nevertheless tied up to the learning curve and the adoption period, in how much the organizations that are activating to adopting this methodology of assessment of the intangible assets now already yield, what effect of a more transparent disclosure, a more elevated interest from the stakeholders, a smaller volatility of the  ratio price / earnings (P/E) and a better evaluation of their Intellectual Capital from the financial analysts and the investors, and therefore they will be able in the future and they will have an incentive to adopt the new technical standards at the right moment, and particularly the XBRL language, when these will fully be made available.

Recognizing, seizing and amplifying strategic serendipity.

Capitalizing on unanticipated, anomalous strategic events.

See how at http://bponline.amcham.gr/?p=1082

Mary and fellow members of ICKC.

I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

The last IC Practitioners was quite good with Dr. John Dumay elaborating on 'IC leads to greater profits'. Indeed yes.

I want to bring to your attention that on 24th November 2011 a Guardian Sustainability Business-Unilever Sustainable Living live Debate brought out a number of issues, well articulated by Paul Polman CEO of Unilever inaugurating the issue of Five Levers of Change. The panellists were Tensie Whelan, president at the Rainforest Alliance, David Jones global CEO at Havas, a global advertising and communications services group, Malini Mehra founder & CEO of the Centre for Social Markets (CSM) and the moderator David Dimbleby. The five levers of change is mainly on effecting a change in the attitude of individuals, society, industry and government as Paul Polman explains. Tough to implement.

Several issues were raised during the debate. I addressed them comprehensively and have released an eBook titled: Corporate Critical Density: sub-titled: Leveraging Companies to Occupy Wall Street (with a case-study on Unilever Sustainable Living Plan).

Corporate Critical Density - is a measure of perfectly matched Corporate and a Balance Sheet of Strategies. Goldilocks effect help the Corporates and assists Governments to govern that Intangible helps to measure strategies. Strategies are left midway resulting in losses and Intangible aids in bringing together the energies and skills of Corporates establishing a clear lead in profits.

Dr. Dumay sometime back evinced interest in my theory of antimatter colliding with matter to create pure energy that I refer to as Intangible and its application . In this analysis of Corporate Critical Density there is an interesting analogy with protons and electrons as +ve and -ve charge to policies and practices bringing out why management of Corporate affairs is a simple arithmetic, without complex variables confusing the decision making. The analogy is extended to neutrons that have no charge as to how people or society or mainstream or stakeholders who have no charge and don’t influence Corporate identity but add to its mass. How participation of society enables energy within corporate multiplying c²(the speed of light times itself) by a fractional addition of its mass and how energy is lost when mass is missing. How ‘Corporate Critical Density’ with a perfectly pitched gravity balancing the optimal efficiency and values together allow, just right things to go on indefinitely.

The book is available at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/dp/B006OUSIMC: and Smashwords https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/116592

I should appreciate your feedback, a community of intellectuals.

warm regards and season greetings to all and in particular to Mary who brings out the joy whenever she speaks, maybe the reason she was named Mary.

Jayar

Dear Mary and Fellow members of ICKC

Working on for the government of Tamil Nadu for a comprehensive valuation of Governance. Every project, every ministry, every local body will be evaluated. You may have a look at the Executive Summary and Table of Contents of my proposal to TN at the link:

http://jayaribcm.wordpress.com/2011/11/14/proposal-to-the-government-of-tamil-nadu-intangible-measuring-governance-deriving-governance-deficit/

What does one do for sustainable values depends on the sustainability of optimal efficiency.

Gross State Domestic Product of Tamil Nadu is estimated Indian Rs.5,81,635 Crores [US$116 billion] spread over an area of 130,058 square kilometres occupied by 7,21,38,958, covering agriculture to nuclear reactors.

How long would it take to evaluate and implement Intangible Value Capital for the State as a whole? That's Intangible beauty of an energy pack!

Your comments are welcome.

Jayaraman Rajah Iyer