Author: Michael D Moberly
ISBN No: 9780 12800 5163
Review date: 17/05/2024
No of pages: 190
Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann, Elsevier
Publisher URL:
http://store.elsevier.com/Safeguarding-Intangible-Assets/Michael-Moberly/isbn-9780128005163/
Year of publication: 03/09/2014
Brief:
Safeguarding Intangible Assets by Michael D Moberly
price
£23.24
While Mike Moberly the author of Safeguarding Intangible Assets is an American, he may be known, and may have been heard as a speaker, by ASIS members. Intangible assets are his speciality. And it’s a good era to have that as your specialism, given how as he puts it at the very start, intangibles (rather than physical assets such as factories) are the building blocks of company value. Think of the internet companies valued in the billions, the Nike logo, the Coca-Cola recipe, the loyalty to a clothing brand or Apple white goods. Business as he puts it in the introduction is ‘now extricably linked to the effective stewardship, oversight and management of intangible assets’, for example looking after an asset, a piece of intellectual property, from start to end of its life. As he goes on to argue, many companies overlook these assets, such as the relationships with customers or company culture, processes or patents, that rivals might like to steal.
Some ways of protecting such assets may be familiar to readers: information security, due diligence, reputation risk. The threats to those assets are the same as with more tangible financial fraud: insiders. Here Moberly quotes the 20-60-20 rule that with variations is often quoted. Namely that 20 per cent of the people we work with are inherently honest and have integrity; another 20 per cent are the opposite, without honesty and integrity; and the other 60 per cent are in the middle of spectrum, and may swing to either end of the spectrum depending on others around them and how the employer reacts to those caught doing wrong. As the author admits, ‘there is nothing particularly scientific’ about the 20-60-20. As he later points out, other threats are when laid-off or financially-strapped employees may feel more like being dishonest to the company, in the economic crisis since 2008.
Moberly does face the tricky problem of how to measure your work on securing intangible assets, given that by their very nature intangibles are hard to put a value on – certainly a company auditor won’t put it on the balance sheet? – and that value may rise or fall wildly depending on such vague things as company reputation. Interestingly, here Moberly quotes at length a 2001 UK Department of Trade and Industry report on intangible assets. In other words, plenty of thinking is going on about intangibles; Moberly has brought it together and offers much for the corporate security or indeed any business professional. A closing chapter makes a good case for intangible asset protection being part of everyday business – for instance, keeping an inventory of intellectual property, because a firm might have the intangible equivalent of a Rembrandt in the attic.
To sum up, while intangible assets by definition are hard to quantify or see, it’s hard business sense to attend to such assets – because your competitors will be glad to attend to them, for you.
Try also his blog – http://kpstrat.com/blog.
