The Intangible Labs

Ask any operational leader—a division lead, or revenue officer, or the CEO —and they’ll tell you their biggest conflict. How they desperately need and want a culture of value creation. Yet, it’s rare. Elusive, even. They will each use different words, but point to the same blockers. How they must “focus” on making the business ever more efficient, instead of tapping the vast ingenuity of people. How they must divide big things into bite-sized bits to create “accountability” which results in siloed, separated, and specialized work, never collaborative enough to turn nascent ideas into robust viable ones. How they are asked to align almost entirely on quarterly profit instead of aligning on what matters. It’s elusive and painful. Which is why we need new metrics. Today, value creation is measured as a residual; 80% of the value of the S&P500 is “intangible.” Intangible, not for lack of case studies and good ideas. But because we don’t have the cockpit dials to tell if we’re flying in the right direction. Metrics signal how things ought to be and what practices and processes should be used. Because metrics establish new feedback loops, they are at the crux of change. And while measuring the “intangibles” of value creation seems lofty, we know it’s been done before when we look at management history. For example, quality (TQM) and brand (NPS). Metrics of value creation. It’s doable. It’s needed. It’s time. Just as E-MC2 changed the world, it did not do so by answering all the questions, but by offering a new lens through which to ask better questions. TIL offers a new lens, a mathematical model, and related practice. So organizations (public, private, profit, non-profit, small, and large) can measure and thus tune the actions that create value for all their stakeholders. As the name suggests, the goal is to create many learning labs while TIL will serve as a hub. Over time, insights will be codified into software, usable as an ESG standard.