Corporate History: “Only Good for Public Relations”
Because the cooperation of subject companies is always necessary, the classic mindset that an organization’s history, or its long-term memory, is only good enough for public relations has to be changed. The books I described earlier outline how business historians, whether academic or otherwise, could improve their presentation of long-term OM to make it more functional for both academia and industry, just one suggestion being for researchers, writers, and the subject institutions that fund them to collectively create a code of conduct to combat the associated difficulties of perceived lack of credibility.
Alongside this, they also explain why history, a deeply unfashionable word in modern education, is important. In an attempt to sidestep this apparent disfavor, I generally refer to history as organizational memory or the institutional equivalent of personal DNA, an attempt to do for corporate and business history what redefining human resources (HR) did for personnel in the 1980s. The outlined tools support the universal paradigm of progress being incremental and learning being continuous but importantly familiarizes managers with the mutable character of decision making within an organizational context.
Done well, both oral debriefings and corporate/management histories are portable, permanent, and superlative induction tools, and when constructed around the objective of illustrating lessons learned in an institutional-specific context, they give walkabout employees an illuminative and better evidential base from which to make better decisions. The outlined formats need skill but are not revolutionary (nor are they expensive), and when carried out imaginatively and professionally, they become extremely efficient repositories of knowledge and experience that can be easily passed down, indexed, cross-referenced, and finally applied. My two books also outline how to convert OM into better decision making by adapting the reflective models created by David Kolb and others to the modern workplace. For easy differentiation from other methodologies, I have called the model experience-based management (EBM).
And just in case highly paid managers will not believe the evidence of their decision-making skills, Corporate DNA has an entire chapter that records how often organizations make mistakes, and specifically the same or similar mistakes. The explicit choice of organizations in the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, South Africa, and Israel provides illustrative comparisons of a wide range of modern industry with relevance to most economies, the common theme being the disconnect between experiential learning and quality decision making.