Mary Adams' & Michael Oleksak's Intangible Capital for Business Leaders

BOSTON, May 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Intangible Capital: Putting Knowledge to Work in the 21st Century Organization is for every manager struggling to succeed and innovate in today's knowledge-based economy.  This must-have handbook takes the ten basic building blocks of traditional, industrial-era businesses and defines their knowledge-era equivalents -- intangibles as the new raw material, intangible capital (IC) as the new factory, IC assessment as the new balance sheet, and networks as the new organization chart -- providing ready-to-implement ideas for managers adapting to the realities of business today.

(Photo:  http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100512/NE03040 )

• The accounting system we use today is over 500 years old.
• This system can only account for 30% of the value of the average company -- the rest is "intangible."
• Adherence to accounting and economic theories from the industrial era means that no one knows how much is invested in the knowledge assets that fuel our economy -- estimates are that it far exceeds the amount we spend on tangibles like factories and equipment.
• Managers, investors and boards of directors fly blind on the 70% of value that comes from intangibles -- they use intuition and gut feel because they don't have access to the right information.

Intangible Capital includes an exercise at the end of each chapter that enables readers to connect the chapter to their own businesses and presents a resource section in each chapter for additional print and online sources.  An accompanying website (www.intangiblecapitalbook.com) has a forum for ideas among readers and has downloads for all key corporate titles (CEO, CFO, CIO, COO, etc.) which show how the book relates to their work.

MARY ADAMS is a cofounder of I-Capital Advisors and Trek Consulting.  She is one of the leading U.S. experts on intangible capital and is the author of the Smarter Companies Blog.

MICHAEL OLEKSAK is a co-founder of the Exit Planning Exchange and Trek Consulting.  He has been a trusted advisor to countless owner/managers of middle market businesses.

SOURCE Intangible Capital