Golden Capital and Other Knowledge-Based Intangibles : Measuring for Excellence Not Compliance

This paper addresses the complexities of the Australian higher education sector in new and challenging times and attempts to make sense of the competing tensions and clashing cultures currently affecting the resourcing, leadership, management, work and workers of this sector in an ever increasing globally competitive environment. This paper will compare Australia’s investment in knowledge against OECD indicators and identify how this is affecting the sector’s ability to compete now and in to the future. It will situate the higher education sector as central to the country’s need to prepare for a future where economic prosperity is based on knowledge creation, production and dissemination and where the productive use of the social, human and intellectual capital (i.e. golden capital) of individuals, teams and organizations will be the key performance indicators of success in a global knowledge-based economy. The paper will point to contemporary education and management literature for examples of how we might more productively lead and manage our knowledge organizations in these new times. I will argue that the emergent gold collar worker - or knowledge worker - and how they are led, managed and engaged in a way to productively use and share their own golden capital is central to the future success of any enterprise engaged in a global knowledge-based economy. Indeed, recognition of their work as the most valuable of resources - rather than an expendable unit of labour - is a first but significant step in navigating out of an industrial economy paradigm toward a knowledge-based one. To this end, the paper will also foreshadow a research project intent on collecting a snapshot of workers views about their own preparedness and that of their organization to move forward, by seeking to identify current working conditions of the contemporary tertiary sector institution. Finally, this paper will bring all of these elements together and test them against the theme and strand of this conference - “what we do matters”; and “measuring and cultivating excellence"