We Need A New Understanding of Intellectual Capital

I’m interested in knowledge—hey, I even wrote a book about it!—and I often work with business leaders who ask me how they can use my ideas to increase their organization’s “intellectual capital.” 

It’s easy to understand why CEOs and other executives look at my work through this lens. Intellectual capital is a powerful idea—it speaks to all the intangible knowledge assets and skills and information that an organization possesses. Essentially, it’s a way of thinking about your organization’s brainpower: what do you know, and how do you use it?

Clearly, that’s a crucial concept for any organization, especially in today’s fast-changing world. If we want to adapt and thrive and grow—and overcome the countless challenges we face, from the rise of AI to climate change—then we absolutely do need to learn to maximize our “intellectual capital” and leverage it effectively.

I’d argue, though, that getting this right might require us to take a closer look at some of the ideas underpinning intellectual capital—and perhaps find a new and better way of framing the key organizational resources and capabilities we’re striving toward.

The problem with “intellectual capital”

What have I got against the idea of intellectual capital? On one level, nothing at all: it clearly is vitally important to assess the kinds of knowledge and knowhow that are embedded in our teams and our organizations, and learn to optimize these resources and activate them effectively.

What I would argue, though, is that while the idea is a good one, as a framework “intellectual capital” leaves plenty to be desired. First of all, there’s that word capital. It focuses our attention on money, and frames “intellect” as a resource to be captured, maximized, and exploited. It asks us, quite literally, to view knowledge through the lens of capitalism, and thus to think of it in terms of winners and losers.

Then there’s the word “intellectual,” which summons up images of turtleneck-wearing philosophers on the Left Bank of the Seine, or eggheads in laboratories. It makes knowledge seem like something esoteric and even a bit elitist—something that not everyone has, and that not everyone is even qualified to have. Above all, it makes us think in terms of “pure knowledge” and hard, rational thought—and in so doing, it actually limits the kinds of knowledge we can think about, understand, and use across our organizations and our lives.

After all, the kind of knowledge that you might find in a philosophy book or in a research lab is really just one kind of knowledge. 

We all know that quantitative research needs to be contextualized and enriched through qualitative research: often a spreadsheet full of numbers tells you one story, but interviews and focus groups tell you quite another. In much the same way, we need to look beyond the purely intellectual in order to enrich our understanding, and build a perspective that accounts for and activates all the kinds of knowledge that exist within our organizations. 

We need a richer perspective

What kind of perspective am I talking about? Well, we might include social aspects of the landscape we’re surveying. What do different people in your organization understand about human relationships, or about how different kinds of intellectual knowledge are perceived and used differently by different groups or individuals? 

We might also include cultural factors. A fact that “everyone knows” might look very different if you come from (or go to) a different cultural context. In some contexts, a business meeting can quickly go south if you don’t use the right rituals and modes of communication at the start of the meeting—and if you’ve offended your counterpart, if doesn’t matter how good your information and your facts are, because they won’t listen to you.

We might even include the spiritual. I don’t necessarily mean religious or supernatural things, but rather the way we look inward—at our feelings and needs and intuitions and insights—in order to make sense of ourselves and the world around us. Our values and belief systems are part of who we are, and if we overlook them then we diminish our understanding of the world.

Above all, we need to recognize that all these different factors are deeply interconnected. You can’t isolate them from each other and expect to succeed; instead, as leaders and as organizations, we need to work to fuse and infuse them into one another. To maximize what we think of as “intellectual capital,” in other words, we need to push beyond intellectual capital, and work to develop a more holistic and human and humane vision of what “intellectual capital” really means. 

From intellectual capital to Knowledge Mindfulness

In writing about Knowledge Mindfulness, this is one of the biggest things I’m proposing: the idea that leading from a place of awareness and understanding of interconnectedness can help us to expand and activate our knowledge in powerful new ways. I am not suggesting that leaders need to downplay the importance of the intellect—I am proposing that they can augment and amplify it by recirculating our intellectual knowledge through our insights, our intuitions, and our emotional and social and spiritual understandings. 

This holistic integrative approach is ultimately more suited to today’s fast-changing and chaotic world, because it harnesses all the power of the intellect alongside the power of intuition in relationship with the “other” and the changing world around us. When you acknowledge the power of culture, social relationships, emotion, insight, and all the rest, it becomes possible to build a more nurturing environment that values and cultivates all these dimensions. 

Importantly, by leaning into this holistic worldview, leaders can create safer and more accepting spaces for their teams to succeed. When they do so, they’ll find that knowledge—with all its multifaceted multi-dimensionality—flows through their organizations far more fluidly and easily, and that their teams are able to activate their “intellectual capital,” along with all the other aspects of their knowledge, in powerful new ways that allow them to succeed on both a personal and professional level.