Over the holidays I came across 101 Things I learned in Business School by Michael W. Preis and Matthew Frederick. It’s crammed with some useful ideas and concepts, much of it useful to small businesses such as the vast majority of textile screen printing shops in Canada. With that in mind, I’m going to be sharing some of this book’s useful contents over the coming weeks.
Here is the first of those . . . It’s titled “People are capital” and lists the various ways in which your people are capital . . .
“Intellectual capital is proprietary information and in-house knowledge of technologies, materials, processes, and markets useful to an organization.
Human capital consists of talents, skills, and knowledge among employees.
Social capital and cultural capital refer to established human relationships, both internal and external to a company, that create and maintain value.”
These are the types of “people” capital they list and I’m sure you will recognize them immediately. The point of course is that being reminded of them helps underscore the importance of preserving this “people” capital for the sake of the ongoing success of your business.
They go on to add an item about “institutional memory” which they say is ” . . . unrecorded collective knowledge, techniques, tools, values, priorities etc., developed in an organization over time.” And here’s the important bit, “It outlasts the employee(s) who first developed it as long as there is significant overlap between outgoing and incoming employees.”