Intellectual Capital/Stewart 191-198

198 The key to success in both endeavors--expanding a web, and jockeying for position within it--lies where we have by now come to expect it: information. The richer and faster the flow of information in a web, the better its participants will be able to seize new opportunities for themselves, thereby making the web's value propositions more attractive to customers.

 

The center, the genome, of all these new forms of organizational architecture is intellectual capital. Internally networked companies, virtual organizations, and economic webs partake of the same information Age economic logic: that ideas, knowledge, information processing, and other intangibles--human, structural, and customer capital--can generate wealth much faster and less expensively than physical and financial assets traditionally deployed. The arithmetic of the goods economy is addition; in the knowledge economy, it's multiplication.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 139-140

140 In a gtg transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all. In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.

...gtg companies, they displayed remarkable courage to channel their resources into only one or a few arenas

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 102-104

104 What have you done in the last 24 hours to encourage the partial anarchy needed to nurture a surprise factory?

...don't let second-rate clients ruin your career and perhaps your life. Reject lousy business (fire rotten prospects and clients alike!) position yourself to pursue clients who can make work fun.

Fire lousy clients (No kidding)

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 185-191

191 That is--in this metaphorical version, at least--each business can draw sustenance from the whole and also flourish because a big, varied ecosystem gives it room to grow, complete, and evolve.

Certainly redundancy carries costs; but it also creates opportunities and savings. First there's knowledge sharing.

You see constant self-reorganization and self-redesign, without the need for a whole lot of coordination across the company.

The best structural capital,...allows a company to act almost reflexively.

The job of management used to be to plan, organize, execute, and measure--POEM. IN the networked organization, the manager's job is best described in organic terms--indeed, in terms of the fundamental material life. The manager's job is DNA: Define, Nurture, Allocate.

Define: Who are we? Why are we in business? What business are? What are our mission and vision and what value do we seek to offer to our customers? The networked company often organizes itself; people gather around projects that need to be done. It's not management's job to run those teams and projects; instead, management's role is to decide what needs to be done, to keep those projects from spinning off every which way by defining the direction in which the organization is headed. Vision-and-values stuff isn't mushy gobbled-gook; it's truly important.

Nurture: The human structural, and customer capital on which organizations depend need to be supported and nourished by managers. What kinds of people and knowledge do we need? What skills are essential to our business? How do we get them, how do we keep them at their best, how should results be rewarded: What kind of environment do they need to do their best? What systems can connect specialist knowledge workers with the least amount of bureaucratic drag? How can we grow relationships with our customers so that they share our fate and we share theirs?

Allocate: Management is about choosing. Among a dozen opportunities, which should we pursue, and with what vigor? What resources do we need? What's the best way to get them--do we grow our own, buy them through an acquisition, or rent them through an alliance? How strictly or loosely do we manage teams' use of those resources? How do we measure results?

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 138-139

139 Hedgehog Concept about aligning worker interests with management interests and --most importantly--because they were willing to go to almost extreme lengths to build the entire enterprise consistent with that concept. ...great results requires a nearly fanatical dedication to the idea of consistency within the Hedgehog Concept.

Those who build the gtg companies, however, made as much use of "stop doing" lists as "to-do" lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.

No one at the company would have a title, unless it was for a position where the outside world demanded a title.

140 In a gtg transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all. In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.

...gtg companies, they displayed remarkable courage to channel their resources into only one or a few arenas.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 184-185

185 In a network, supervision changes. There's less supervision of the content of the work, more supervision of a person's overall performance and career.

To develop complex products, you need lots of people with specialized knowledge, working together in a little virtual department. Functional organizations do an excellent job of developing experts, but a lousy job of linking them with experts in other fields.

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 134-138

138 Indeed, a great company is much more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little.

It takes discipline to say "No, thank you" to big opportunities. The fact that something is a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity" is irrelevant if it doesn't fit withing the three circles.

Up Your Cash Flow / Goldstein 76-80

80 PAYMENT OF EXPENSES: 4 methods of determining how bills will be paid

Alternative 1: Assume that all expenses are paid during the months they are incurred.

Alternative 2: Take a look at each expense item on the profit and loss budget, then decide when that expense will be paid.

Alternative 3: Assume a certain percentage of the bills incurred each month will be paid during the month incurred, a percentage in the first month following that month, and a percentage in the second month following that month incurred.

Alternative 4: To add more precision to Alternative 3, you could actually take your total expenses for a given month, subtract all those payments that you know will be paid during the month incurred, and then compute the balance left in the manner indicated in Alternative 3.

Other Receipts: When doing your cash flow forecasting, it is necessary to assume the inflow of any additional funds that come either from investors, bank loans, sale of assets, or any other source. It is important to know when these amounts will be received to apply them to your projections for the proper month.

Additional Payments: ...necessary to include in your forecast any additional cash being disbursed for deposits, purchase of assets, down payment on the purchase of assets, principal payments on loans outstanding, payment for deposits of income taxes, payroll taxes, and any other cash out-flow you feel will be incurred during the period you are forecasting.

Words of Caution---seek professional help.

Intellectual Capital/Stewart 178-184

185 In a network, supervision changes. There's less supervision of the content of the work, more supervision of a person's overall performance and career.

To develop complex products, you need lots of people with specialized knowledge, working together in a little virtual department. Functional organizations do an excellent job of developing experts, but a lousy job of linking them with experts in other fields.

The Pursuit of WOW/Peters 102-104

104 What have you done in the last 24 hours to encourage the partial anarchy needed to nurture a surprise factory?

..don't let second-rate clients ruin your career and perhaps your life. Reject lousy business (fire rotten prospects and clients alike!) position yourself to pursue clients who can make work fun.

Fire lousy clients (No kidding)

GOOD TO GREAT/COLLINS 128-134

130 Whereas the gtg companies had Level 5 leaders who built an enduring culture of discipline, the unstained comparisons had Level 4 leaders who personally disciplined the organization through sheer force.

134 The key point is that every step of diversification and innovation stayed within the three circles.

The gtg companies at their best followed a simple mantra: "Anything that does not fit with our Hedgehog Concept, we will not do. We will not launch unrelated businesses. We will not make unrelated acquisitions. We will not do unrelated joint ventures. If it doesn't fit, we don't do it. Period.

In contrast, we found a lack of discipline to stay within the three circles as a key factor in the demise of nearly all the comparison companies. Every comparison either (1) lacked the discipline to understand its three circles or (2) lacked the discipline to stay within the three circles.