A month ago, in "Reputations and Bottom Lines", I mentioned the publication of Mary Adams' and Michael Oleksak's new book Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st-Century Organization. A copy of this little tome has now arrived in my letterbox and I've had a chance to leaf through it.
It's much more fun to read than the rather solemn title suggests, combining strands of history, economics, management, metaphor and common sense, personal experience and anecdote. It's also a monument to the metamorphosis of management and asset management philosophies from the age of bricks and mortar to the world of the internet. It won't provide the answers to all your questions (how many books of 150 pages do?) but it gets the reader into the mindset for asking the right questions. Since the right answers are (i) business-specific and (ii) change in time, while the right questions can be applied more generally and are less subject to the vicissitudes of commercial fashion, this is altogether a greater benefit to the reader.
