Everything, it seems we work towards in business, is for seeking out new value creation, for new growth, for wealth creation, for providing improved returns on the investments we have been making.

To achieve this we consciously have to set about the value capture and what contributes to its realization. This is where innovation plays such a vital part. If we don’t build our innovation capital we will certainly have a much harder, perhaps even impossible time of realizing new value. We are more than likely to just maintain our existing value or see it steadily decline. So a constant focus upon renewal is always needed. Do we consciously do that on a daily basis or just once a year at annual review time?

Value-adding activities need to be central in nearly all of our decisions. The how we can turn our resources into being more productive, more creative is increasingly becoming one our biggest strategic areas of  future investment decision. Our resources are those all-inclusive assets, capabilities and processes that make up the Enterprise.

Yet it is clear management is spending far more of their discussion time and focus on the ‘harder assets’ that are made up of land, buildings, equipment and machinery – the ‘heavy’ financial capital investment decisions. Any new investment in IT, processes, software are usually well identified in the accounting or discussed within the narratives that support the reported numbers. We constantly report on these in our annual reports to validate and justify management’s decision.

Where we still seem to remain far too silent upon is our ‘softer capabilities’ Of course we extol the virtues of our employees for their hard work, for their vital role within any result, yet we still struggle to go beyond ‘simple’ articulation and quantify this value. Why is that? Continue reading →