Présentation de l'éditeur
Visionary in scope,
Intellectual Capital is the first book that shows how to turn the untapped knowledge of an organization into its greatest competitive weapon. Thomas A. Stewart demonstrates how knowledge--not natural resources, machinery, or financial capital--has become the most important factor in economic life. Through practical advice, stories, and case histories, Stewart reveals how organizations and individuals can create and use the knowledge assets they need. Dazzling in its ability to make conceptual sense of the economic revolution we are living through, this ingenious book cuts through the vague rhetoric of "paradigm shifts" to show how the Information Age economy really works.
Intellectual Capital should be read as if the futures of your company and your career depend on it. They do.
Extrait
Preface to the Paperback Edition
In October 1994, I spoke about intellectual capital at the first of what has become a series of conferences called "The Knowledge Advantage," sponsored by the Strategic Leadership Forum and Ernst & Young. During a question period following my talk, someone asked, "Do you think this stuff will become a fad like reengineering?"
"I don't think so," I confidently answered. "There's nothing to sell." The management of intellectual capital--organized knowledge that can be used to produce wealth--didn't seem to lend itself to being packaged and sold. So long as no one had a commercial reason to push the idea, I figured it would not be pushed too far.
So much for my crystal ball. The response to the publication of
Intellectual Capital--more accurately, the response to the ideas it discusses--has been far greater than I could have imagined. As the year's crop of annual reports showed up in my mailbox in the spring of 1998, a bit more than a year after the first publication of this book, I found the phrase "intellectual capital" in one glossy document after another. I have received letters, phone calls, and e-mail from every continent except Antarctica. Both the World Economic Forum, whose principal constituents are big companies from advanced economies, and the World Bank, whose principal clients are the least-developed nations, have taken up intellectual capital as major themes of their work. In advertisements in
The Economist, Slovakia touts its intellectual capital as a reason for businesses to invest there. For the government of Peru, it became a focus of a 1998 National Competitiveness Summit; for the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington, D.C., it is the subject of a major study group; in company after company--banks in Australia, technology companies in Silicon Valley, chemical companies in Europe--managing intellectual capital has become a prominent subject of both conversation and action. And on Dilbert's Web site (at http://umweb2.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/career/bin/ms2.cgi), "intellectual capital" has become one of the phrases that pops up in Scott Adams's random "mission statement generator."
I don't mean to claim credit (or accept blame) for anything other than having unfurled a sail in time to catch a wind--as others also have. But it's quite a wind. If companies handle it well and aren't blown off course, they will, I am more convinced than ever, find themselves propelled to new lands, rich with unexpected opportunities. Certainly the trends described in Part One, "The Information Age," have in this very short time grown much, much stronger. In April 1998, the U.S. Department of Commerce published a superb report,
The Emerging Digital Economy by Lynn Margherio (available at www.ecommerce.gov or from the Government Printing Office in Washington), that irrefutably and dramatically updates the discussion in Part One, showing that knowledge continues to increase its dominant or defining role in national output, corporate competitive advantage, and labor markets. Intellectual assets continue to displace physical and
