Strategic Finance: Integrating non-financials to create value
By Ryohei Yanagi, CMA, CFM, and Nina Michels-Kim, CMA, CCCA
“The Power of Intangibles” by Gary Cokins and Nick Shepherd in the May 2017 issue of Strategic Finance provided a call to action to management accountants to understand intangibles and their relationship to value creation. In addition, the September 2017 article on “Sustainable Development Goals” by Cristiano Busco, Giovanni Fiori, Mark Frigo, and Angelo Riccaboni further illustrated the need for management accountants and organisations to strive for “performance with a purpose.” As a follow-up to those articles, we would like to further strengthen the case for the importance of intangibles by briefly addressing the supposed dichotomy between nonfinancial metrics and financial value by presenting empirical studies that show a clear link between intangibles and value.