Intangible assets

I have been leading efforts on data analytics or the generic term big data, though I focus on the analytics part.  Tobin's Q has been rather an interesting aspect of analyzing the value of information for a company.  Manufacturing companies are valued against their hard assets, but then what about the global giants of the information age, which have come to grow bigger?

A good blog by Mr. Doug Laney, VP Research, Gartner on what is Tobin's Q and how it is impacting the valuations of the companies today.

"… a study by intellectual capital research firm, Ocean Tomo, shows that the portion of corporate market value attributable to intangibles has grown from 17% in 1975 to a whopping 81% in 2010."

Now, if there is any CEO out there still with their head buried in deep productivity gains through automation, and process improvement, they can see the sunset of their companies quickly coming.  The American automakers are the ideal examples.

The question is how do these companies gather data, turn it into information, yet information is not enough.  It is the creation of knowledge from information that leads to extraction of value.  The world is filing up with a plethora of massive data collectors though with minimal idea of how to transition from data to information to knowledge.  Opportunity remains high for analytics providers.

Read the complete blog here at Gartner.

Multilingualism and the business world

Hiring individuals who know more than one language for a multinational is some what a necessity these days.  But does it imply that there is higher value in learning a second or third langauge.

The Economist analyzes the question here, in "Johnson: What is a foreign language worth?"  It seems like there are premiums paid for different second languages.

On monopolies and capitalism

Gigaom writes on "Giants behaving badly: Google, Facebook and Amazon show us the downside of monopolies and black-box algorithms."  Read the complete article here.

Nothing new that we have not seen in capitalism before, though with an interesting 21st century spin.  Though the analysis of Facebook is interesting:

"You can stop using Facebook, but that’s not going to stop a billion or so other people from using it, and therefore it’s not going to stop them clicking on what Facebook decides is newsworthy or not newsworthy, and driving traffic to those sites, and thereby helping to determine whether they live or die. And unlike Google or Amazon, there isn’t even much of a case for antitrust, because it’s not clear what market Facebook dominates."

Brain trust at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Twitter,and IBM

Excellent infographic at Wired showing where the hiring is done at most of the San Francisco Bay Area companies.  Perhaps I can look at some of those schools myself.

Interesting how significantly IBM leverages Indian universities, while most companies, other than Google maintain geographically close ties.

Click the image to enlarge.

Manage up?

Sage advice from the folks at Forbes here "My advice on managing up - don't".  I worked with a few executives who were brilliant at it at couple of the Fortune 100, with success to boot.

"...the best way to be looked upon favorably by those you report to is not through various charades and other forms of skulduggery, but by simply doing your job and serving them well. When the emphasis of your efforts shifts away from others and to yourself you have placed yourself on a very slippery slope. If you want to move up in the organization let it be the quality of your work that catapults you upward, not your skill in manipulation. If your timetable for career acceleration isn’t matching up with that of your employer, surface your concerns with them in a straight-forward fashion, don’t revert to amateurish corporate hi-jinks."

The upwards manager does not realize that their organization thinks poorly of them or outright does not respect them, if they do not share and bring the results down.  In the end, they are short timers.

Replies to the article are particularly interesting.  Enjoy!

Open data

Celebration of open data, some interesting insights, still a ways to go.  Read the article at The Economist here.  Details from McKinsey, AidData, Open Government Foundation, Open Data Institute, and others.

Worldwide - Women's impact on economics, education, health, and politics

Delightful info-graphic from The Economist on women's impact on the various aspects of various countries around the world.  Read details here.

Early education reinvention

Can creativity be killed?  Can the status quo be institutionalized?  It seems that is what some of the thought leaders are proving… delightful, as well as showing what it takes to move past it.

The latest article in Wired, "How a radical new teaching method could unleash a generation of geniuses" highlights.

"Peter Gray, a research professor at Boston College who studies children’s natural ways of learning, argues that human cognitive machinery is fundamentally incompatible with conventional schooling. Gray points out that young children, motivated by curiosity and playfulness, teach themselves a tremendous amount about the world. And yet when they reach school age, we supplant that innate drive to learn with an imposed curriculum. “We’re teaching the child that his questions don’t matter, that what matters are the questions of the curriculum. That’s just not the way natural selection designed us to learn. It designed us to solve problems and figure things out that are part of our real lives.”"

The story in the article of a teacher in the slums of a border town (to USA) transforming the capabilities of his students is a real world example of what is possible.  Note in the article that the status quo is unable to accept this transformation.  Read the complete article here.

See Mr. Sugata Mitra's Ted talk "Sugata Mitra: Build a School in the Cloud" below to hear one of the leaders leading the above change across the world.

Working hours versus productivity

A picture is worth a thousand words... perhaps more!

 

From The Economist here.

The above may be correct for corporations, in my experience in the entrepreneurial world the above curve is inverted.  But then "burn out" is a common occurrence as well.

UPDATE: I was asked given that I have created and led smaller companies and also been in multinational, why the curve does not apply to entrepreneurial or smaller ventures?

The answer is quite simple: Entrepreneurs work on what they love, can't stop thinking about, and want to make sure it is successful.  Same does not hold true in a multinational.  In larger corporations, mostly the work is assigned, loving what you do is not necessarily true, yet most of all, the creative mind is caught in the proxy battles.

What is a proxy battle?  A proxy battle is one where the executive layer of the company is vying and fighting for the top spot.  That creates a war, which disseminates down the hierarchical chain turning in proxy battles between the various organizations.

Generational characteristics

 

From The Economist here.

Entrepreneurs - break your bad

"A Harvard MBA will set you back $90,000 (plus two years’ lost income). You can buy a deluxe edition of all five seasons of “Breaking Bad”, complete with a plastic money barrel, for $209.99, or a regular edition for less than $80."

I had to pay attention when Schumpeter in the latest Economist called the television series "Breaking Bad" - "... one of the best studies available of the dynamics of modern business."

Using "Breaking Bad", Schumpeter highlights why successful entrepreneurs are able to turn insights, ideas, way of looking at the world in a contrarian way, into businesses:

• Huge ambition.
• Product obsession.
• Partnerships and alliances.

Sounds like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and the like!

So, what is the draw back: Hubris - "An impressive volume of social-science studies suggests that leaders are more willing to break the rules than followers. There is no shortage of corporate examples, from Enron to Olympus, to illustrate this."  Fortunately, or unfortunately, this is human nature, and it will not change.  Of course, exceptions are there to prove the rule.

Enjoy the complete article here.

Gensler surveys design in work space

One of the design and architecture companies I follow is Gensler.  Most of their work shows that they comprehend the user and the consumer of the space well.  See Gensler here.

Mr. Gerald Gehm, Managing Director, Gensler, forwarded the this work space survey to me "2013 U.S. Workplace Survey; Key Findings."  Worth reading!

I took the liberty of pulling the following visual from one of Gensler's publications.  It describes the "work modes" an office worker lives.  Key is focus versus what has become the goal of work spaces i.e., collaboration.

See my previous blog "Design in work space" here; see my blogs on design in general here.