Give Business Historians Their Head
If scholarly knowledge management is the preferred route, then into which branch of academia should the teaching of experiential learning fall? My view is that it should be business history, even though its specialists have been only marginally successful in promoting their own discipline in most geographical areas outside the United States and Japan. For one, they are probably the best qualified at giving OM the necessary credibility, and secondly, such historians have been looking for a more constructive role for their labors for years. For industry practitioners, this reassignment should not have to displace archivists or librarians, who would still be required to maintain the institution’s records, but it would probably necessitate a new placement (a knowledge manager/director?) to oversee the efficient management of OM.
For whoever takes on the role, there are a number of mindset issues to be aware of:
Because of the changed working environment, both academics and commerce/industry need to stop seeing knowledge as employee resident. Institutional revolving doors and musical chairs have given OM a fleeting character that prescribes value to the employer only if it is resident within the organization and available to itinerant employees to apply.
Employers need to realize that supporting the flexible labor market at the same time as trying to reduce job turnover is like shouting into the wind. Better to deal with the inevitable discontinuity, corporate amnesia, and poor decision making separately.
Academia and industry/commerce have to decide whether or not they really believe Henry Ford’s pronouncement that “history is more or less bunk” (it survives as one of the most often quoted aphorisms to debunk the subject; Chicago Tribune, 1916). If they agree, they need to explain why, for example, experienced employees are paid more than the inexperienced.[3]
[3] Henry Ford’s affirmation of experience’s lack of authority took 8 days of cross-examination in a successful court case for libel against the Chicago Tribune, which had described him as an “anarchist” and “ignorant idealist.”
OM and experiential learning have to be acknowledged as sensible management tools, with all parties more fully appreciating the close relationship between the evidence of precedent and better decision making.
Organizations should realize that failure does not provide the only learning opportunity. Success can also be improved upon.
To overcome innate managerial defensiveness about personal and corporate performance, employers need to encourage cultures that support objective reflection. Specifically, they need to see experiential learning as less of a threat and more of an opportunity by demonstrating a corporate maturity that extends beyond the defensive posture of the insecure.
Industry/commerce should accept that higher productivity is as much an issue for management as it is for workface employees. In truth, high-skill employees are no substitute for poor decision making from above.
The lessons of business and corporate history should not be the private musings of the elderly; ownership should be employer-specific, beginning with the next generation of managers. That way, the shortsighted will at last be able to listen to the longsighted.
If they are to lead the charge in experiential learning, academic knowledge management has to admit the wider definition of experiential learning into its orbit and historians have to also see themselves as knowledge practitioners.
Just as the detail of institutional-specific experience is essential to the preparation of conventional case studies, so too will it be central to experiential learning. As such, the device will need a continuing collaborative effort of business education and employers—arguably more than has existed in the past—if industry and commerce are to maximize the potential benefits.
The bottom line is that if managers are not taught how to better benefit from their employer’s hindsight, the dialogue in one of English novelist J. L. Carr’s texts, “You have not had thirty years’ experience. You have had one year’s experience 30 times,” will continue to echo Robert Hayes’s cited observation about administrative nonlearning (Carr, 1972, p. 128; Hayes, 1984). To quote another academic, Professor Leslie Hannah, the United Kingdom’s first professor of business history, “History provides experience cheaply.” Or, if a real business person’s commentary is preferred, consider the words of J. G. Pleasants, a former vice president of Proctor & Gamble: “No company can afford the luxury of rediscovering its own prior knowledge. Understanding the company’s past can lead to adapting previous successes, avoiding old mistakes and gaining knowledge far beyond personal experience.”