Appreciating Assets and Capital

At the beginning of this week I held a lunch seminar introducing Appreciative Inquiry (AI) to a group of User Experience people. AI is one of my favourite topics and always a joy to talk about. In my presentation I made good use of the video kindly provided by Jackie Kelm. In her overview of the basic concepts and history of AI she also talks about the concept "appreciate". I very much like the many meanings of this word, both how we use it in everyday talk in order to describe what we really like but also as a financial term.

Later in the week I hade the privilege of participating in the CIP Forum, this year focusing on convergence. Here an important topic is "assets", especially intellectual assets. I also like the taste of this word, assets. An asset is something valuable that cannot always be transferred into money as for example in "his greatest asset was his warm smile".

Although I think the reasoning is valid behind "intellectual capital" as in the famous book " Intellectual Capital: Realizing Your Company's True Value by Finding Its Hidden Brainpower " by Leif Edvinsson and Michael Malone, I must confess that I prefer using assets instead of capital when talking about the creative stuff that comes out of people's brains. However, in the physical world I do appreciate them both.