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Book Review
Invisible Advantage: How Intangibles
are Driving Business Performance
Jonathan Low and Pam Cohen Kalafut
By Brian Gillespie
Invisible Advantage presents the case for
the conscious management of sources of intangible value inherent
in every organization; value often overlooked to the detriment
of the organization's competitive edge. Based on their research
and experience as consultants in Cap Gemini Ernst and Young's
Center for Business Innovation, the authors introduce 12 such
intangibles including a number to which design managers provide
no small contribution.
The book commences with an introduction
to the "Intangibles Economy", essentially that percentage
of corporate valuation derived from intangibles, followed
by 12 chapters on individual intangibles, each concluding
with advice on how to manage that particular intangible. A
short chapter at the end of the book outlines five steps companies
should take on the path to realizing the value from their
intangibles and achieving a competitive edge. Grouped into
three categories, leadership, relationships, and inside the
company, the authors provide an extensive range of tangible
examples of intangibles in action within both old and new
economy companies representing a wide range of industries.
Many of these examples, such as Southwest, Amazon.com, Apple,
and Saturn, will be familiar to design managers, as their
strategic use of design has also been credited with a key
role in their success. Nevertheless, design is only occasionally
mentioned throughout the text, and invariably as a topic incidental
to the primary intangible being discussed.
As the authors regularly point out, the
perceptions of stakeholders are important to the success of
many of these intangibles. Since design management is often
described as the management of perceptions, the role of design
in such intangibles as communication, brand equity, innovation,
and reputation, could have been a valuable contribution to
the dialogue. Design professionals, eager to have Design managed
as a strategic investment rather than a tactical expense,
will need to make their voices heard or face being left behind
by other special interests more advanced in communicating
the value of their own particular set of intangibles. A book
on the subject of design's contribution to the creation of
intangible value, with charts, graphs, tables, or images designed
to make the concepts and research more tangible, could bring
the narrative to life and be an excellent strategic resource
for design managers.
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