Intellectual Capital/Stewart 88-89

89 Human capital is easily dissipated. It needs to be massed and concentrated. That means that organizational intelligence, like any asset, must be cultivated in the context of action.

Any task, process, or business relies on three different kinds:

1) Commodity skills, abilities that are not specific to any particular business, are readily obtained, and are more or less equally valuable to any number of businesses.

2) Leveraged skills: knowledge that, while not specific to a particular company, is more valuable to it than to others. ...Leveraged skills tend to be industry-specific, but not company-specific.

3) Proprietary skills: the company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business.