The Tangible Power of Intangible Assets (HBR Article Collection)

How can you roll your corporate strategy into action so it delivers on its promise? Strengthen the organizational capabilities--intangible assets such as top-notch leadership, a high-performance culture, and innovation prowess--that directly support your strategy. Defining what your firm does best, your organizational capabilities reflect your workforce's collective talents--and are hard for rivals to copy. A variety of capabilities can put your company at the head of the pack. But don't try to excel at all of them. Instead, select the essential few that most enable you to implement your strategy. Next, determine how your organization measures up on them, inviting executives, employees, investors, suppliers, and customers to rate your firm's performance. Finally, devise an action plan for assets that need enhancing, including who will do what when and which metrics you'll monitor. This Harvard Business Review Article Collection helps you identify capabilities most crucial to your strategy and describes techniques--capabilities audits and the latest Balanced Scorecard tools--to assess your performance on each. HBR Article Collections include an overview and three full-text HBR articles, each with a synopsis and annotated bibliography. The three articles: "Capitalizing on Your Capabilities" by Dave Ulrich and Norm Smallwood (HBR reprint R0406J), "What Really Works?" by Nitin Nohria, William Joyce, and Bruce Robertson (HBR reprint R0307C), and "Measuring the Strategic Readiness of Intangible Assets" by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton (HBR reprint R0402C).