Familiarity, Exemplars, and Lessons

When especially crafted as management tools, history—or OM and its coworker, experiential learning—provides several important elements in the unavailable educational mix (Kransdorff, 2006). First, they give individuals an inheritance and a familiarity of business that they would not otherwise acquire, qualities that would furnish employees with a head start in the life race that is their career. Secondly, these tools provide role models, which as entertainment and sports have shown, are great motivators. More importantly, they would also give individuals the opportunity to learn the lessons of prior businesspeople and organizations, giving employers a much more valuable manpower resource that is prior experience.

Whether it is familiarity, exemplars, or lessons, all have benefits that are huge. But how best can OM be injected into wide practice? Through industry associations, management consultancies, employer-based management training, or business education proper?

It is my view that the management of OM and experiential learning should not be constrained to any one instructional route but is probably best slotted into the discipline of KM, which now has a keen academic and management training focus and which conveys a more worthy intellectual asset than history (Kransdorff, 2006). For the sake of the discipline’s credibility, the lead should come from academia, for which there are also huge untapped resources of scholarship, from validation to injecting improved psychological processes and methodology, and upgrading digital indexing for cross-reference purposes. However, if the mortar board cannot or will not do it, the lead should come from nonacademics or industry directly. Given another generic lesson of business history—the idea that supply is invariably demand led and most academics are notoriously not particularly proactive—perhaps it is the latter that has to lead the way.