capture and dissemination as a strategy for business survival. The
rationale for this very deliberate emphasis is succinctly stated in
The New Organizational Wealth,in which author Karl Erik Sveiby
claims that “people are the only true assets in business.”^1 In this
context, people are viewed as the repositories of knowledge capital,
which is subsequently defined as the cumulative wealth of an orga-
nization as measured by its collective knowledge, skills, and talent.
Evidence of this phenomenon is all around us. Here’s one that
should strike a chord for most people in today’s workforce: “Faster,
better, cheaper!” This pronouncement has become a mantra of
business in the twenty-first century. Any CEO will tell you that
finding ways to develop and deliver products and services in less
time, with increased quality, and for less money is a cornerstone of
success. CEOs know this to be true because the free market dictates
a higher performance bar than ever before. “Faster, better,
cheaper!” ultimately translates into speed, innovation, quality, and
operational excellence, and it is our contention that these metrics
can only be realized through the intelligent management of knowl-
edge capital. Said another way, because virtually every business
mission, strategy, initiative, or goal requires the use of some form of
human competence, the faster, more reliably, and more intelli-
gently that competence can be developed and deployed, the more
likely it is that a business will achieve its objectives. In addition,
translating competence into performance requires knowledge in
various forms.
Consider these additional realities:
- A Macintosh PowerBook 5300c weighs 6.2 pounds, has 8
megabytes of RAM, and sports a 500-megabyte hard drive. The
original IBM personal computer tipped the scales at 44 pounds, and
the keyboard alone weighed 6 pounds. It contained something
called “user memory,” 16 kilobytes’ worth. The Mac has 500 times
more brainpower than the original IBM computer but is one-
seventh the size. That’s a 3,500-fold higher ratio of intelligence to
physical matter.
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