While the airplanes American Airlines’ owns show up on its balance sheet, Sabre was nowhere to be found. A teacher once asked Yogi Berra, “Don’t you know anything?” and he said, “I don’t even suspect anything.” GAAP’s deficiencies in measuring intellectual capital notwithstanding, for our purposes we are going to separate a company’s IC into three categories, as originally proposed by Karl-Erik Sveiby—a leading thinker in knowledge theory—in 1989:
1. Human capital
2. Structural capital
3. Social capital (customers, supplier, network, referral sources, alumni, joint venture, alliances, etc.)