NET WORTH.(The Talk of the Town)(National Hockey League)

Aside from the usual consortium of Zamboni drivers and Don Cherry fanatics, few people mourned when the National Hockey League cancelled its season, a few weeks ago, after the owners and the players failed to come to a new labor agreement. But the fact that people are uninterested doesn't mean they don't have an interest. Businessmen should be paying attention to the N.H.L., because its troubles could soon be theirs. The impasse is less about hockey than it is about history--and being on the wrong side of it.

Traditionally, owners haven't had such a hard time. In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled. Toyota owes its success to its machines, its assembly lines, and its system of production. For Wal-Mart, it's primarily store location, technological efficiency, and product selection. For Coca-Cola, it's carbonated beverages and exceptional distribution. Workers for these companies are, for the most part, interchangeable, so their bargaining power is limited.

But in a host of industries--most notably in what we now call the knowledge economy--the arrangement is different. In Hollywood, in Silicon Valley, on Wall Street, and in professional sports, hard assets matter far less than people. The employees--the so-called knowledge workers--make the difference between success and failure. (Difficult though it may be to think of pro hockey players as knowledge workers, that is essentially what they have become.) Capital is plentiful; it is skilled people who are scarce. The salient struggle, in this realm, is no longer capital versus labor but, in the words of the business professors Roger L. Martin and Mihnea Moldoveanu, capital versus talent. So when N.H.L. owners speak wistfully of old-time hockey, what they really mean is old-time economics--when the boys were labor, not talent.

The upshot is that in many knowledge businesses the employees often do better than the shareholders. Investors in the Hollywood studios have historically earned small returns, and yet directors and actors make tens of millions of dollars. In the N.H.L. the past two seasons, players reportedly took home seventy-five per cent of the league's total revenue. Even in Silicon Valley, land of the inflated stock price, companies are so desperate to attract and keep the best and the brightest that workers often prosper at the expense of the capitalists. In 2000, according to a Business Week estimate, Cisco Systems employees earned between five and eight billion dollars in option profits alone--in a year when the company made only $4.6 billion. And, according to the 2003 book "In the Company of Owners," during the tech boom a few years ago employees at the top hundred New Economy companies pocketed almost eighty billion dollars in compensation.

Talented workers were always ...