Tom Stewart, Don Tapscott, John Seely Brown, John Hagel, Stan Davis, Baruch Lev, Verna Allee, Ted Levitt, Bob Kaplan & David Norton, Kevin Kelly, Fritjof Kapra, Shoshana Zuboff, Geary Rummler, Ross Dawson, and Tom Malone say that what you can’t see (intangibles) is more valuable than what you can see (tangibles).
Relationships are worth more than buildings. Intellectual capital, social capital, customer capital, whatever you call it: this is what’s important in the age of networks.
I am growing weary of explaing why old-style numeric ROI that does not take intangibles into account is a bean-counting exercise from yesteryear. Here’s nine minutes of my thoughts on the subject.
By the way, You Tube is a fantastic resource. To my amazement, 1,800 people have watched my 10-minute YouTube video on informal learning.
The video above is the first take. Editing was minimal. Start-to-finish, this You Tube video took me about an hour and a half. (Of course, the ideas were already in my head.)
4 comments ↓
Hello Jay,
I especially enjoyed your post and video on Intangibles. You have given me inspiration to use You Tube to communicate important information about our youth poverty/homelessness capacity building project. We are using a community of practice approach to increase practitioner skills and program relevance in working with youth experiencing poverty. The ideas you present resonate a lot with our intentions. I am consistently asked to frame our work in ROI numbers and your video will help me respond more effectively to these queries.
Brent, I wish you well. YouTube certainly gets the message out. Visitors know that they’re not going to face long downloads, installing some odd-ball driver, filling out a long form for the marketing department, or wasting time figuring out what button to push. The only downside I’ve found is the marquee image YouTube selects. The one above makes me look like a mad man.
Jay,
I just discovered your blog, and this was the first post I looked at. Nicely done. You express concisely something I have always known to be true. ROI has always been a load of rubbish in my opinion; people know what is of value and what isn’t. Some numerical justification may be necessary, but only to support the intangibles, not the other way around.
Jay…really appreciated your comments…first thing that came to mind outside of you being RIGHT about the value of intangibles was how for those of us that have no paycheck but are LOADED with intangibles…there is no way to cash in on what we have…I keep trying and hope to find the magic equation. Loved the video…
–bill
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