It's a big deal when the balance of economic value of American public companies shift from tangible to intangible assets.
A recent Economist profile, entitled "The Battle for Brainpower," quotes that intangible assets are now more than half the market capitalization of U.S. public companies, and, according to their citing of an Accenture study, the shift is up to 70% in 2006, from 20% in 1980. Those intangible assets reside predominantly in the domain of what is described as "tacit" interactions.
Dan Pink, in his book, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future," refers to this as the transition to the conceptual age, where the ability to form relationships, sythensize concepts, and engage in complex, problem solving, is more to the fore as a key set of skills for the modern company or organization.
The Economist article focuses on the issues of the dearth of talent as an emerging business issue, and as a primary resource issue of nations. Yet they note that high talent individuals often decline in productivty for up to a year when they move from one company to the next and don't bring elements of their work teams with them (their productivty context).
Companies often continue to organize and relate to their workforce as if it was still predominantly "tranformational" * or "transactional.**" The Economist defines talent simply and powerfully as "the ability to solve complex problems or invent new solutions." Lawrence M. Miller calls this talent broad-slicing in his book, "The New Capitalism" (in contrast to Malcolm Gladwell's thin-slicing concept), and articulates how broad-slicing functions at a leadership, capability and operational levels in organizations.
Talented individuals don't exercise their talent in a vacuum, but often in the context of conducting their work in a team or collaborative process, whose members often represent diverse disciplines and cultures, and are often part of a global team or supply chain.
Collaboration practice enables talented knowledge workers to effectively connect with their team, creates a context for and fosters an ability to synthesize to analyze complex problems to allow individuals able to "see" all the elements of a problem. A high functioning team of talented individuals can then build on their collective experience and wisdom to be even more productive on the next set of problems or innovations. Collaboration tools support those business and organizational needs.
*Transformational: extracting raw materials or converting them into finished goods.
*Transactional: transactions that can be easily scripted or automated.
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