Three researchers wanted to measure something that has never appeared on a balance sheet, and the method they settled on is odd enough to be worth describing. They pulled more than a million employee reviews off Glassdoor. Then they asked a language model to invent two reviews from scratch, one describing a company with a deep reserve of organizational capital and one describing a company running on empty, and used those inventions as the theoretical poles. Real reviews were scored against them. Every firm came out the other side with a number, year by year.1

The number behaved. It shifted with macro conditions, it differed across firms and inside the same firm over time, it moved when something big happened internally, and it lined up with firm performance and with the influence of top management.1 So the thing executives have spent thirty years calling soft is now a time series, and anyone with a scraper can build it about your company without asking your permission.

The one asset you are not allowed to delegate

The definition underneath all of this comes from earlier work by Wouter Dessein and Andrea Prat, who described organizational capital as an intangible, slow-moving, productive asset that can be produced only with the direct input of the firm's leadership, and that is subject to an agency problem.2

That production clause is the part worth stopping on. Nearly everything else a company runs on can be bought, hired, licensed, or contracted out to somebody with more expertise than anyone on the payroll. Equipment, software, distribution channels, a fair amount of the strategy work. This one arrives with a named input requirement and the name on it is yours. It arrives with a rate, too. Slow-moving is doing real work in that sentence, because an asset that accumulates across years can be drawn down inside a quarter without anybody logging the withdrawal.

The asset that best explains why one firm outruns an identical competitor for a decade is the only one on the list an executive cannot hand to a function and check on later.

I have watched enough leadership teams react to a poor engagement score to know the shape of what tends to happen next. A working group forms. Somebody in HR is asked to own culture, which is a sentence that ought to stop a room and rarely does. Initiatives get scheduled against the fiscal year. The whole effort is then reviewed at the next offsite using the same instrument that raised the alarm in the first place.

The instrument in the building keeps flattering you

I sat in a session where a speaker walked through a company convinced its employee satisfaction stood at one hundred percent. When somebody finally measured it properly the real figure was seventy-seven. Nobody there was lying. They had an instrument, the instrument returned a number, and the number was pleasant enough that no one went looking behind it.

The IC Index 2026, a survey of five thousand UK employees, found the same divergence at scale. It is worth saying plainly that the report comes from the Institute of Internal Communication and the employee research firm Ipsos Karian and Box, both of whom benefit commercially from the conclusion that communication deserves more investment.3 Even allowing for that, the reading is uncomfortable. Fifty-six percent of employees said they would recommend their employer, down from sixty-two percent a year earlier.3 A six point move inside twelve months tells you which direction the account is running.

Spent by omission

The finding from that report I keep returning to is smaller and stranger than the headline. Failing to communicate good news, meaning wins, progress, and genuine achievement, was associated with lower willingness to recommend an employer than mishandling bad news was.3

My read is that this is what drawing down the stock looks like from the inside, and it explains why so few executives catch it while it is happening. A botched layoff announcement is an event. Somebody writes it up, somebody gets blamed, and the organization at least registers that a withdrawal occurred. A quarter in which a team shipped something genuinely hard and nobody with a title said so leaves no record at all. There is no meeting about it, no postmortem, no line item. The balance simply moves.

A few weeks back I wrote about how clarity decays unless leaders keep renewing it, and I am not going to relitigate that argument here. What the organizational capital research adds is an accounting frame. Trust, clarity, the belief among your people that effort registers somewhere above them, all of it behaves like a stock rather than a state. You are putting in or drawing down at every moment, including the many weeks when you are convinced you are doing neither.

What changes now that somebody else can read it

For a long time an executive could treat organizational capital as unfalsifiable, because there was no reading of it available from outside the building. Now there is one, assembled from what your people write when their names are not attached, and it holds up well enough that researchers in accounting, economics, and finance are putting it to work.1 Your acquirer can compute it. So can the firm trying to hire your best engineer, and so can the analyst who covers you.

Which leaves an awkward question, and I would rather ask it than dress it up. What did you personally do last quarter that put anything into that account? Not the culture committee, not the engagement survey vendor, not the town hall someone else wrote. You, in hours that came off your own calendar. If the answer takes you more than a moment to find, what do you think the people writing those reviews would say you spent your time on instead?