[Know-how]
<<< My experience has been that know-how is more valuable
than anything else. Maybe its not attitude, its undersanding.>>>
This brings to mind Al Gore's comments from his speech at the CEO Conference hosted by Bill Gates last week.
<<<In the old economy, the key to growth was an individual sector. In the new economy, the key to growth may be an economic web and the diversity of those webs both require and create. Invent the personal computer, and you inevitably spawn a web of products and services that move outward from that event -- mouse pads, computer repair shops, Windows 95, and so it goes. The economic web is, itself, the generator of the next novel growth opportunity, innovation sparks innovations. And establishing the proper conditions for innovations to flourish is one of the policymaker's highest obligations.
But the larger move from hard to soft is affecting every one of your companies. In the old economy, the value of a company was mostly in its hard assets, its buildings, machines and physical equipment. In the new economy, the value of a company derives more from its intangibles, its human capital, intellectual property, brain power and heart. In a market economy, it's no surprise that markets themselves have begun to recognize the potent power of these intangibles. It's one reason that net asset values of companies are so often well below their market capitalization.
Baruch Lev, an accounting professor at the NYU Business School, says that nearly 40 percent of the market valuation of the average company is missing from the balance sheet. For high-tech firms, the percentage is more than 50 percent. And recent research by Ernst & Young's Center for Business Innovation suggests that securities analysts are basing about 35 percent of their portfolio decisions on intangibles, and that the more an analyst relies on these factors, the more accurate his or her predictions seem to be.>>>
Looks as though you're right on.
Pat |
