Hundreds of Businessmen Later

The author’s role at the Financial Times was company commentator and specialist writer for the newspaper’s Management page, which gave him the opportunity of meeting, on an annual basis, literally hundreds of senior-ranking businessmen across the commercial spectrum. The industrial transformation could not have been more dramatic, with the period around 1980 marked by companies being mainly reactive and defensive in character. Thereafter, once the government started demonstrating through legislation that the industrial initiative was being shifted to the boardroom, companies literally mutated before the author’s eyes. Among the areas in which the author took a special interest were personnel, management education, management consultancy, and management itself. He also covered the early examples of companies addressing the issue of radical job changes that would herald the onslaught of downsizing and the industry-wide white-collar shakeout of older workers, outsourcing and working from home. In all this activity, he noticed something unusual.

In conversations with all these fast-running businessmen, it was conspicuous that the most successful had a keen historical perspective of their industries, business in general, and their own companies in particular. They were easily able to refer to precedent and incremental developments within a longer historical timeframe. In contrast, the less successful managers—defined as those whose employers either ranked below the first division of their sector or who did not seem to last very long in their jobs—were notably nonreflective about their activities to the extent that they were distinctly dismissive, even hostile, about looking back. A fairly typical response from this group of people—the majority, it seemed—would be that reflection was no more than nostalgia or sentiment, that they considered it more important to look forward, that past models didn’t apply because circumstances and tools changed or that they wanted to change their culture, not perpetuate it. Often, they would insist that many decisions were taken in defiance of precedent, conveniently ignoring the associated reality that one had to know what the precedents were in order to take a contrary course. The other observation was an almost obsessive disposition to avoid admitting to—and discussing—mistakes. When it was unavoidable, the blame was invariably placed elsewhere—except by the more successful managers.

The interim conclusion the author came to at the time was that some managers probably had better public relations advisers. But as the anecdotal evidence built up and reinforced the author’s surveillance, why, he kept asking himself, would an awareness of how one’s predecessors did things—and the events they had experienced—make the difference, especially in an environment where, as his defined set of unsuccessful managers kept reminding him, circumstances seemed to change so often?