Knowledge is today’s capital: Strategy & Leadership interviews Thomas A. Stewart

Abstract

An interview with Thomas A. Stewart, recently appointed editor of the Harvard Business Review and formerly Editorial Director of Business 2.0 and a member of the Board of Editors of Fortune. His latest book is The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty‐first Century Organization (2002). Stewart’s message: Knowledge is the most important factor of production in the modern economy and a key to achieving competitive advantage. Investment in intellectual capital almost invariably provokes further complementary investments, producing a self‐feeding circle of investment and value creation. If you don’t know why you’re doing knowledge management, you shouldn’t be doing it. To apply knowledge management ideas and tools to solve business problems, you have to first identify the business problems. More companies are now operating in real time. In these companies, management can see their companies running almost the way an open‐heart surgeon can see the heart beating. That is going to change the art of management in a lot of ways. One effect will be to increase the visibility of the importance of knowledge and information. The response to 9/11 has made people much more aware of the value of their knowledge and much more aware of how to manage, collect, and protect both that knowledge and the people who create and embody it. As we move forward, I think we will be seeing an explicit recognition that deploying and redeploying people and knowledge leads to the fastest growth.