Wealth of Knowledge Intellectual Capital and the 21st Century Organization

Chapter 1 The Pillars of the Knowledge Economy We are confronted with insurmountable opportunities. Walt Kelly Consider a key. Dig into your pocket or purse, pull out your key ring, and examine one of the keys--car key, house key, office, mailbox, trunk-in-the-basement key. I'm looking at the key to the door of my office, a piece of silverish metal about two and a quarter inches long; the name of the manufacturer, Corbin, is stamped on the end where my fingers grip it. A key is a physical object. It has size, mass, specific gravity. It can be dropped, lost, bent, hung on a hook. A key contains information as well as molecules. The serrations along the top of the business end of the key--if you traced them onto a sheet of graph paper, they would resemble the electrocardiogram of a man with not long to live--are a code. They instruct one lock, and only one lock, to open; the lock has a matching set of cuts and ridges that order it to yield to one key, and only one key. Keys used to be heavier and less intricate than the one in your hand (You can put it away now). That is, they were more massive and less knowledge-intensive; my father-in-law owns a large, rusty, old iron key, about eight inches long, that he uses as a doorstop. The oldest known key is a big wooden bar from which pins stick up like the bristles of a sparse brush. The pins match holes on a wooden bolt that secured a door in the ancient Assyrian city of Nineveh some 4,000 years ago. The fancy, gorgeous locks and keys of the Middle Ages and Renaissance were more show than security; their ingenious metalwork elegantly obscured the fact that picking them was child's play. That changed in the late eighteenth century, when an Englishman, Joseph Bramah, revolutionized locksmithing by manufacturing devices of unprecedented intricacy--that is, by increasing their information intensity. More than half a century passed before anyone managed to pick a Bramah lock. If you're traveling as you read this, you might have in your pocket a little plastic card that is also a key, the key to your hotel room. The code, the instructions--the knowledge content--of this key reside in the magnetic stripe on one side. When you checked in, the clerk at the front desk stuck the card into a small device and typed in a code matching one that had been set for the lock in the door of your room. You can't see the code; if you compare two card keys, you can't tell if they are for the same or different locks. These keys can also hold a lot more information. They can tell time; if you ask for a late checkout, you might need to present your key to have an extra hour or two added to its clock--alternatively, the clerk might reset the clock in the lock on the door. Similar keys can carry money: The MetroCard in my wallet, which unlocks the turnstiles of New York City's subway, contains $13.50 as I write this, I believe, but no one can tell how much value is stored in it just by looking, any more than you can see the code on a hotel-room key. Before MetroCards, I filled my pocket with subway tokens; I could feel their weight and hear their jingle. If I put more money in my MetroCard, I notice nothing. In mechanical keys, the physical object and the information are one and the same. The code is literally cut into the metal, visibly and inseparably. If you skip town with a metal hotel-room key in your pocket and the lock is not changed, you could return and unlock the door. That's not so with card keys. Signs outside aluminum smelters warn visitors to remove their credit cards and hotel keys: The magnetic field created by the electricity that pulses through these factories will wipe the cards clean. The hotel-room card will no longer open the door after you check out: The lock will have been changed--physically it will be untouched, but its information component will be new. Keys are a metaphor that helps to describe how the so-called new economy--theStewart, Thomas A. is the author of 'Wealth of Knowledge Intellectual Capital and the 21st Century Organization' with ISBN 9780385500715 and ISBN 0385500718.