Intellectual Capital

"Even without a common yardstick for measuring Intellectual Capital, the recognition of its presence by informed observers will establish a value for a firm that dwarfs its balance sheet."

"Too many deserving companies are underoptimized and undercapitalized, and thus sometimes are unable to complete their destiny."

"Intellectual Capital values activities, such as customer loyalty or employee competence building, that may not impact the bottom line of a company for years."

"Modern enterprise changes so fast that all it has left to depend on is the talents and dedication of its people and the quality of the tools they use."

"Intangible assets arose in response to a growing recognition that non-bookkeeping-type factors can have an important role to play in the company's real value."

"One useful way to look at a company is as a tree. The hidden value of a company is the root system of that tree."

"Human capital was the heartwood of the tree, the source of its life."

"Skandia AFS, along with many of its competitors, had come to realize that to grow as fast as its global markets, the traditional strategy of establishing new subsidiaries abroad was simply too slow and inefficient."

"What is required is a shift from the management of the past to the navigation into the future in terms of renewal and development."

"Take Intellectual Capital and subtract from it one of the new building blocks, human capital, and the result is structural capital."

"Comprehensibility and inclusiveness are a lot easier in theory than they are in practice."

"The simple title "Raw Financials" actually encompasses something close to chaos."

"The digital revolution has not only created gigantic new industries, such as personal computing and semiconductors, but those products have in turn transformed in some way almost every product and service in the world."

"The litany of what can go wrong with the implementation of new technology in a corporation is not designed to scare everybody away from infrastructural innovation."

"Short of the world turning upside down, it is possible to identify areas of emphasis by which a company can ready itself for impending change and then actively promote its own renewal in response."

"Affixing a value to behavior or motivation is an entirely different matter from, say, accounting for total sales or determining computer capacity."

"The work environment will change as many companies, no longer needing a large physical presence."

"There is evidence that International Accounting standards have begun to recognize the growing importance of Intellectual Capital metrics."

"This is a huge opportunity for the accounting industry to get back in the middle of the action. Yet there are two obvious obstacles to the profession doing so."