Movimientos comerciales de los Servicios Soporte

In the beginning there were products and services, things we made or things we delivered. Then money became the great bean-feast. In the 1980s doing imaginative things with money – derivatives, junk bonds, leveraged buyouts, futures – was the way to make it really big. Now, doing imaginative things with information is the road to riches. Walter Wriston, the former chairman of Citibank, was right: information about money is now more valuable than money itself.

Look at Michael Bloomberg. After running the invest- ment bank Salomon Brothers’ equity trading and technology systems, Bloomberg left the company in 1981. With a group of fellow ex-Salomon employees, Bloomberg founded Innovative Market Systems – later renamed Bloomberg. It now has annual revenues in excess of $1 bil- lion and Bloomberg is CEO. Bloomberg’s insight was that though he was successful trading with money, he could make even more when he reported on money and gave people information about money.28

In the information age, information is dollars. Matt Drudge is the man at the keyboards in his LA office con- trolling the Drudge Report. He styles himself as a kind of Woodward and Bernstein – the Watergate journalists – on the Internet, investigative journalist, gossip-monger, techno-newshound. Drudge will go down in history as the man who broke the Monica Lewinsky story – if the sordid tale ever reaches the history books. Drudge provides instant inside information on what is happening in the American corridors of power.

Inside information is commercial gold. Companies spend billions of dollars seeking to capture information about

their customers. “Loyal customers are the spoils of the information wars and those who own the customer infor- mation own the market,” says Sean Kelly, Managing Director of the Data Warehouse Network.29

But it is not only information about money which is more valuable than money itself. Information about prod- ucts, services and just about anything that you can think of is worth more than the underlying offering. And it is not only the amount of information that is crucial, but its time- liness and accuracy. Yesterday’s news on customer expectations and experiences is simply history. Today’s news on customer expectations and experiences is tomor- row’s profits.

Competence-based competition

Brainpower dominates modern corporations. It is their essence. We are increasingly competing on competence. A company such as Ericsson is more than 50 percent service and pure knowledge work, and at

Hewlett-Packard and IBM this figure is closer to 80 and 90 percent. They are all being transformed, whether they like it or not, from manufac- turing companies with a little service to service companies with a little manufacturing. Today, all companies are, or should be, brain-based. “We have 300 tons of brainpower ... How can we motivate our people so that those 300 tons

move in a certain direction?” says Göran Lindahl, head of ABB.30

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The changes we witnessed during the 1990s were pretty dramatic. Just study the table of the top ten companies in terms of market value in 1990 and 1998, respectively.31

Look, for example, at Microsoft. With only 27,000 employees, Microsoft is not the biggest company in the world, but it is still the company with the highest stock market value. In 1993, which isn’t very long ago, it had 14,000 employees and a turnover of about $3.75 billion.32

In the same year, one of the largest corporations in the world, General Motors, had a turnover of $120 billion.33

Even so, by the end of 1993, Microsoft was worth more than the whole of General Motors. Today, it is worth approximately 6.5 times as much.34

Think of how big General Motors is. In terms of rev- enue, it is still the largest company in the world ($161 billion as compared to Microsoft’s paltry $14.4 billion). It has thousands of buildings and warehouses; it has huge sophisticated machines. It has been around a long time and in 1996 assembled 647,000 people, the population of a decent-sized city, to do its work.35 _{Even without vehicle}

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Company Market value Company Market value

1990 ($bn) 1998 ($bn)

AT&T 119 Microsoft 318

IBM 69 General Electric 295

Industrial Bank of Japan 68 Intel 194

Shell Group 67 Merck 188

General Electric 63 Exxon 174

Exxon 60 Coca-Cola 170

Sumitomo Bank 56 Wal-Mart Stores 165

Fuji Bank 53 IBM 152

Toyota 50 Shell Group 149

sales it would still rank among the top 30 Fortune 500 com- panies.36 _{Yet, Microsoft outstripped it without apparently}

breaking sweat. Microsoft doesn’t have as many offices, warehouses or machines as General Motors. It doesn’t employ as many people. In fact, the only asset of Microsoft is human imagination. It is brain-powered.

The good thing about General Motors is that it looks like a big business. With its office blocks, real estate, legions of people and huge factories, it is what we imagine big busi- ness to resemble. Our image of corporate perfection is locked in the past – reflected in accounting procedures, management principles, generic strategies, office architec- ture, use of language and so on. At least the past gave you something to hold on to. The trouble with intellectual cap- ital, brainpower, or

whatever you choose to call it, is that it is ethereal and elusive. We even lack a proper language to describe knowledge. For all the checklists and models, calculating the power of the brains assembled in a room, let alone a cor- poration, is close to impossible. It is diffi- cult to explain, describe and evaluate. Still, we must perse-

vere in our pursuit of knowledge – after all, love is also difficult yet we continue to try.

Brains are now more powerful than entire countries. In 1998, Norway had roughly $17 billion in cash in the coun-

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