Capital versus talent. The battle that's reshaping business.

Abstract

For much of the twentieth century, labor and capital fought bitterly for control of the industrialized economy. The titans of industry ultimately won a resounding victory over the unions, but the story doesn't end there. In today's economy, value is largely the product of knowledge and information. Companies cannot generate profits without the ideas, skills, and leadership capabilities of knowledge workers. It's these factors--not technologies, not factories, and certainly not capital--that give the most successful companies their unique advantages. As knowledge workers come to realize this, and see that the demand for their talent outstrips the supply, they are steadily wresting more and more of the profits from shareholders. This time the battle is between the sources of capital and the producers of value, and how it will end is far from clear. The roots of the current conflict lie in the twentieth-century shift from industrial to managerial capitalism and the creation of a new class of professional talent, the authors explain. Since the arrival of the information-based economy in the past decade, tensions have escalated. The dramatic rise of CEO pay--and the public fire it has drawn--is a telling symptom. With this new battle, we're also witnessing a fundamental change in the political alignment of capital. The Left is now siding with "the common shareholder" against the well-compensated top tier of the labor pool. Shareholders seeing an unprecedented proportion of the return on their investments siphoned off to employees may well ask, is there no end to it? Increasingly, it's human capital that is the basis of value, and financial capital has become far more generic than shareholders would like to believe. The growing tensions between shareholders and managers cannot be ignored, and capitalism is at a crossroads--again.