Fame is Fleeting

Two Superperformance stories, "What Makes a Superperforming CEO?" and"Who's Next?" were bumped to the front page of Forbes.com today. Exciting news for the Corpus Optima family and for advocates of Servant Leadership andSuperperformance. Earlier this month Dave Guerra spoke about the 'way of being'of a Superperforming organization to a record crowd for Houston's OrganizationDevelopment Network. In today's world of information overload and nonosecondexposure, fame is especially fleeting. But one thing that doesn't flee is thetruth. Truth is evergreen. And if Manage Process, Lead People is the essential heurisitic, if PxC is the true sweet spot of Superperformance, the signal can only grow stronger. Eventually truth will out. Truth is a witness unto itself.

Here Come the Intangibles

Herb Kelleher, long term CEO of Superperformer Southwest Airlines, dubbed by Fortune Magazine as perhaps the greatest CEO in history, sees the invisible part of Southwest Airlines as the company's greatest (and most perishable) asset: "What keeps me awake at night are the intangibles. You can get airplanes, you can get ticket counter space, you can get tugs, you can get baggage conveyors. But the spirit of Southwest is the most difficult thing to emulate. So my biggest concern is that somehow, through inattention, through misunderstanding, we lose the esprit de corps, the culture, the spirit--if we ever lose that, we will have lost our most valuable competitive asset."

Astonishingly, the intangible dimension today makes up more than 70% of most companies' stock market value. Google this month raced past Wal-Mart in market capitalization - $220 billion vs. $182 billion - based almost entirely on intangible value. The New Economy is here. These days, it is not fixed assets but intangible expectations of future success that drives a company's value. In a recent article, New York Times reporter Denise Caruso lamented, "Today's sophisticated knowledge economy is stuck with the equivalent of an abacus for measuring the actual financial value of corporate assets and liabilities. . .today's markets are being transformed by intangibles, and a growing number of companies are scrambling to find the methods that will help them better use, develop and communicate about them."

Intangible comes from the Latin tangere, to touch. Intangible means untouchable. Download this chapter from Moving the Needle, Measuring Things Hardly Measured, to learn more about how Superperformers leverage intangibles - the spirit of the company.