Article Title: Immaterial Values in Business Management Author: Stephan Szugat Word Count: 915 Article URL: http://www.abenetis.com/encyclopedia.html Format: 65 Characters per Line ------------------ ARTICLE START ------------------
Immaterial Values in Business Management
Maybe you have already heard that in some ways immaterial values are important for business management. But you might not found how to bring them into your management processes or into your reporting packages. However, first of all we should be clear, what immaterial values are? Well, this includes
balance sheet information about intangible assets, but is going far behind it.
As we all know, decisions are mostly based on feelings or emotions, than on logical judgement. A feeling is an energy. Energy is not material, it is immaterial. The overall emotions or motivation of employees in a business is a immaterial value, it could have positive and negative impact on business development. Does sound very esoterical for you? Might be, but today we know that our emotions drive a lot of our life.
Not only feelings of emplyoees have an impact on business development, also feelings of potenial customers have it. These customer feelings could be measured as customer satisfaction, as how customers see company or it's products and services and so on. There is more energy, which is immaterial, included in our business life as we are aware of.
Until today we might know about these energies or have read that businesses have to be more aware of them. But to find Solutions which are able to measure these energies are not very common and hard to find. Business Management still uses hard figures such as ratios based on financial values and just forgets that there has been more than only numbers from accounting and money in pocket.
If you only look to accounting figures of a business, you only look to this company as if you were looking at an iceberg. You only see a fraction of iceberg, only what is above surface. Everything below surface is out of your view. While iceberg is melting away, it still brings up new parts of it self. But you only see this new parts, when iceberg is melting. It's just same with accounting figures as soon as you see them they are gone. That means they are old, it's nice to knew them, but they relate to business already accomplished.
The accounting figures are just like to iceberg when it comes above surface while it is melting away. Now, wouldn't it be great to see whole iceberg, even if a big part is below surface? Yes, it would be great. The immaterial values of your business are just below surface. If you bring them up, you could see whole picture of your business.
Running a business only focusing on profit could lead to running into a collapse. It might take time, but soon customers and employees will find out that just profit counts to a specific company. Well, it's correct, no business could survive without profit, but first of all every business has to make profit on immaterial items, such as image, motivation of employees and customers faith.
