Intellectual Capital

Knowledge has become the most important factor in economic life. It is the chief ingredient of what we buy and sell, the raw material with which we work. Intellectual capital--not natural resources, machinery, or even financial capital--has become the one indispensable asset of corporations.

Intellectual Capital is a groundbreaking book, visionary in scope and immediately practical in application. It offers powerful new ways of looking at what companies do and how to lead them. This is the first book to show how to turn the untapped, unmapped knowledge of an organization into its greatest competitive weapon. It reveals how to unlock the value of hidden assets; how to find them in the talent of a company's people, the loyalty of its customers, and the collective knowledge embodied in an organization's culture, systems, and processes. And it shows how to manage these vital assets--which until now have largely been ignored.

Dazzling in its ability to make conceptual sense of the economic revolution we are living through, Intellectual Capital cuts through the vague rhetoric of "paradigm shifts" to show how the Information Age economy really works--and how to make it work for you and your business.

Thomas A. Stewart is an award-winning member of the board of editors of Fortune magazine. He pioneered the field of intellectual capital in a series of landmark articles that earned him an international reputation as the chief expert on the subject. The Planning Forum called him "the leading proponent of knowledge management in the business press," and Business Intelligence, a British research group, gave him a special award for his outstanding contributions to the field. He lives in Manhattan.