Intellectual Capital

Knowledge has become the most important factor in economic life. It is the chief ingredient of what we buy and sell, the raw material with which we work. Intellectual capital — not natural resources, machinery, or even financial capital — has become the one indispensable asset of corporations.

Intellectual Capital is a groundbreaking book, visionary in scope and immediately practical in application. It offers powerful new ways of looking at what companies do and how to lead them. This is the first book to show how to turn the untapped, unmapped knowledge of an organization into its greatest competitive weapon. It reveals how to unlock the value of hidden assets; how to find them in the talent of a company's people, the loyalty of its customers, and the collective knowledge embodied in an organization's culture, systems, and processes. And it shows how to manage these vital assets — which until now have largely been ignored.

Dazzling in its ability to make conceptual sense of the economic revolution we are living through, Intellectual Capital cuts through the vague rhetoric of "paradigm shifts" to show how the Information Age economy really works — and how to make it work for you and your business. Here you will learn:

• How to discover and map the human capital, the structural capital, and the customer capital that together embody the knowledge assets of a corporation
• How successful companies like General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and Merck & Co. manage their intellectual capital to improve performance
• Why flows of information have more impact on profits than the movement of goods
• How intellectual capital can free up financial resources to dramatically increase profitability
• Why the rise of the "knowledge worker" leads to new principles of managing people — so that companies can really mean it when they say employees are their most important asset
• How to collaborate with customers to build wealth together
• How the knowledge economy affects you personally and in your career; and how to capitalize on the opportunities it presents.

Read Intellectual Capital as if the future of your company and your career depend on it. They do.

• Part One - The Information Age: Context
• Chapter 1: The Knowledge Economy
• Chapter 2: The Knowledge Company
• Chapter 3: The Knowledge Worker
• Part Two - Intellectual Capital: Content
• Chapter 4: The Hidden Gold
• Chapter 5: The Treasure Map
• Chapter 6: Human Capital
• Chapter 7: Structural Capital I: Knowledge Management
• Chapter 8: Structural Capital II: The Danger of Overinvesting in Knowledge
• Chapter 9: Customer Capital: Information Wars and Alliances
  
• Part Three - The Net: Connection
• Chapter 10: The New Economics of Information
• Chapter 11: The Networked Organization
• Chapter 12: Your Career in the Information Age
• Afterword
• Appendix: - Tools for Measuring and Managing Intellectual Capital

Do you want an introduction to the subject, read this book.