I recently listened to a podcast that started talking about all the different forms of capital, and how each is incredibly valuable. I thought I’d spend a little time talking about the concept, and I’ll likely go into detail over future posts on what each of them means.
- Intellectual
- Spiritual
- Social
- Material
- Financial
- Living
- Cultural
- Experiential or Human
the idea behind this is that money isn’t the only thing of value. Especially when you look at starting a business. If you don’t have all 8 forms of capital is at least some form, you can’t expect to have wild success. For example, it’s taken me a long time to understand the value of social capital. Social capital at it’s heart is working with other people. If you don’t have this, you have no choice to do everything yourself. This includes building the product, building a sales and marketing pipeline, finding all your own prospects, closing the deals and on and on.
Being in a small business, I’ve tried to do this. It doesn’t work. The logic is very simple. No one has the time or aptitude to be great at all of these things. I used to shy away from the idea of partnering with other companies, thinking it would hurt my profit margin, and after all, I could do it myself. Nothing could be further from the truth. By companies that I can work with symbiotically, we can all win, instead of just flopping around trying to learn just enough skills to keep me afloat.
Some of the list is pretty obvious… others are require a little more thinking. But the bottom line is, what forms of capital are you currently leveraging? and how you leverage other forms of capital that you have overlooked?
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike