Hugh McLeod does the cartoons. His writing also completely rocks.
Expressive Capital
1. First we had Human Capital. You! There! Go to the next village and kill everybody because I’m the Chief of this village and I say so etc.
2. Then came Physical Capital. Land, property, factories etc.
3. Then came Financial Capital. Money, credit, dollars etc.
4. Then came Intellectual Capital. Our widgets are better than your widgets because our engineers are smarter than your engineers etc.
5. Then came Emotional Capital. People love our product more than they love our competitor’s product etc. This is the space “Love Marks” (http://www.lovemarks.com) plays around with so successfully: “A Love Mark is a brand that is loved by its user beyond reason” etc. So naturally, I’m thinking, “What next?” How do you out-Love-Mark the Love Mark?Perhaps…
6. Expressive Capital. Our products make it easier for the end user to find and/or express meaning, narrative, metaphor, purpose, explanation and relevance in his/her own life than our competitor’s products.
Good ideas continue to be interesting two years later. I found this buried back in the 2005 archive of my blog. Before ISTE added creativity, before A Whole New Mind, before we found Ken Robinson on TED Talks.
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hmm hmm hmm.
When I think about this, I think about people who have intense relationships with the tools they use to write – the fountain pen folks who wax lyrical in longhand about the tools they use, the guy in Japan who has found the exact brand of quadrille index cards to take notes on, and the some-time legion of Moleskine toting hipsters.
The bit of expressive capital that I sometimes have in my possession is the postcard with exactly the right image on the opposite side, so that the person who gets the card gets not just my message but the full impact of the picture too. (And of course the card is hand written and timed perfectly and worth keeping).
Nice catch.