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Comments

Marc Goldberg

Thanks,

This is excellent,
I'm teaching a class tomorrow at HEC-ISA on how to manage intagible asset, a class for a metrics and measures, and i shall you the goodhart law as a health warning during my intro...

Marc.

Alex

Well, what can I say except that I fully agree with what you have written Eric.

Regarding my personal experience, when I tried to tie performance and knowledge management, I met "intangible assets" (u are right Marc, this law is a good place to start a course on that topic)...BSC (Kaplan & Norton), Skandia's Navigator (Edvinsson & Malone)...and so what!!! This metrics are so complicated that you spend much more time and energy to transform knowledge into something

Two major findings I have made:
1. Companies who have tried to measure and report its intangibles have encountered bad financial results at the same time! Check the Skandia website and tell me if the intangibles report is still made today...of course it is not! (it was made in 1994)
2. You can manage what you cannot measure. I think there are only engineers who can say that! I tell you a short story: interviewing a manager in the company I am doing my PhD I ask him:
- what is the value brought by KM?
- the value...you want a figure??? I give a figure...12!!!...this is my figure, my value of KM...
This guy was right. It is impossible to measure such a complex process in a knowledge based economy.

So far, I believe in success stories to measure that kind of value. When people talk, they measure the benefits by creating a sense of wht is going on.

What do you think?

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