Excerpts:
p.1 If managers could find a way to estimate the value of their intangible assets, they could measure
and manage their company's competitive position much more easily and accurately.
p.2 Intangible assets seldom affect financial performance directly. Instead, they work indirectly
through complex chains of cause and effect.
p.2 By understanding the problems associated with valuing intangible assets, we learn that the measurement
of the value they create is embedded in the context of the strategy the company is pursuing [JLJ - sounds a bit like
Joseph Schumpeter in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy - p.83-84"Every piece of business strategy acquires its
true significance only against the background of that process and within the situation created by it. It must be seen in its
role in the perennial gale of creative destruction; it cannot be understood irrespective of it or, in fact, on the hypothesis
that there is a perennial lull."]
p.4 The degree to which the current set of assets does - or does not - contribute to the performance
of the critical internal processes determines the strategic readiness of those assets and thus their value to the organization.
p.4 Strategic readiness is related to the concept of liquidity, which accountants use to classify financial
and physical assets on a company's balance sheet... Strategic readiness does much the same for intangible assets - the higher
their state of readiness, the faster they contribute to generating cash [JLJ - or, in game theory, the faster they contribute
to creating stress for our opponent or mitigating the effects of the opponent's stress in our position]
p.13 Using the systematic approaches set out in this article, companies can now measure what they
want, rather than wanting only what they can currently measure. Even if the measures are imprecise, the simple act
of attempting to gauge the capabilities... communicates the importance of these drivers for value creation... The measurement
and management of these assets played a prominent role in their transformation into successful, strategy-focused organizations.
