What Is LES Good For?

Bill Elkington, LES Chairman of the Board & President, gave the following acceptance speech at the Annual Meeting in Chicago on October 25, 2017.

By Bill Elkington

What is LES good for? I mean, what are we (IP professionals or intellectual capital management professionals—speaking more broadly) good for?

Personally—I mean this is just me speaking—I think we may be here to change the world.

Please allow me to restate that: I'm convinced that we are here to change the world.

And by that, I mean we are here to make the world a better place. Make prosperity more likely. Improve everyone's standard of living.

This is, of course, what intellectual capital does, when it is properly protected and properly managed to create and deliver value. And this is what we do when we manage and help others manage intellectual capital.

We are magicians, in a way. I mean real magicians. Twenty-first century descendants of the Maji, who were a group of revered and learned people at the dawn of human history. They were regarded at the time as capable of making a beneficially and sensibly changed natural world through agencies in the supernatural realm.

Intangibles are supernatural, in a sense, aren't they? You can't see them, touch them, smell them, taste them, or hear them, but they do affect the natural world in profound ways. The world of intangibles stands behind or beyond the sensible world and informs it, which of course includes humanity itself.

Well, I don't want to push the analogy too far. And I certainly don't mean to offend anyone's religious sensibilities or beliefs.

But I do want to suggest that something quite profound is going on here, where human innovation intersects with law, financial analysis, investment, deal-making, business strategy, business models, IP analytics, data analytics, M&A, and business processes. We—the people in LES, the people in this room today, the people in the profession of intellectual capital management—stand in that intersection. We bring together the intangible and tangible worlds, releasing value. Releasing economic well-being.

It's easy for some of us to lose track of this. Sometimes we pay too much attention to the minutiae of our quotidian work; we forget to look up and see the much larger frame, the much larger universe in which we labor. The more profound purpose enlightening our daily digging.
Sometimes I think of what we are doing as gardening. Many of us don't make the seeds or design them; although some of us have a hand, even in this. Most of us prepare the ground, plant the seeds, tend them, and harvest and market the results, or we help others do this. Or we teach others to do this. And all the while, an enabling financial analysis powers us forward through this work. We help others do this analysis. And we teach others to do it.

We coax life out. We nurture it along. We help the earth, the sun, and the rain turn a dusty substance into nourishment. Into life. Into wealth and well-being. We help to fill the storehouses of our community with abundance.

Or think of what we do this way: We guide others through the portal of the present into an infinite number of dazzling futures.

What more can we ask for than this, from our work? The opportunity to transmute the intangible into the tangible, to help make something from next-to-nothing, to guide others out of the present and into a more prosperous future.

This is what a career in intellectual capital management offers. And that is why LES exists. To encourage this. To nurture this. To give those of us who choose this vocation important knowledge and tools, to provide opportunities to learn from one another, to put into place structures and processes that enable our members to develop consensus on the important intellectual capital management issues of the day, and to offer up a platform for our members to inform the broader community, that our work may be magnified unto the world.

2017 Annual Meeting Photo gallery link: http://www.lesmeetings.org/am17/gallery/