The world is a wash in capital, nearly thirty trillion dollars has been dumped into the global market

by central bankers all around the world since 2008.

Yet while there's plenty of cash out there in the financial system,

the real economic recovery is still pretty lackluster,

and that's in part due to lack of top-tier human capital.

As any first year MBA student knows,

executives are supposed to treat property capital as an asset

and labour as a cost on balance sheet

But in order for the economy to grow,

education and skills have to keep pace with technology

or productivity suffers, which exactly what we are seeing today in rich countries,

they're having lower productivity and slower growth.

The human resources company Manpower actually reported recently

that 40% of global companies have a talent shortage,

and the part of the problem is that companies aren't investing in their talent pool as they might.

Workers and the knowledge that workers hold

is too often treated as dispensable,

so nurturing human capital and then harvesting its riches

in the form of intellectual property is really the hallmark

of today's most successful businesses.

It's no longer the most capital intensive companies,

but those like Apple or Google, with the most IP

that take the greatest profit share.

McKinsey research shows that 10% of corporations take 80% of all the profits.

So why them?

Because they have higher levels of

digital information flows, patents and R&D spending.

Knowledge, not cash, is the new capital.