Hindsight Is the Key

The answer did not come immediately, but it eventually struck him that business decisions were no different to decisions taken in other areas of life—better made with the benefit of hindsight.

This wasn’t a particularly earth-moving moment, a surprise, or rocket science until the author discovered how absent hindsight was in the world of business. The author’s research at the time revealed that British workers at all levels acquired little historical awareness of business from the wider educational system or the workplace. While there was a passable level of exposure in schools and universities to the 220-year-old industrial revolution and economic history dealing with macrofiscal issues, there was a noticeable absence of corporate and business history that would familiarize the emerging generation of workers, consumers, and potential investors with how, at the practical level, their parents and grandparents earned their livings—the type of information, for example, that traced the development of companies in particular and business in general. In at least one outside survey, secondary school children, for example, could name just two British companies. It was puzzling because there was plenty of political history, social history, and military history in the curriculum to demonstrate the bona fides of the genre as an educational tool and as a means to reinforcing a culture. But for the people who had to go out and earn their living in the business world—that is, practically everyone—there was virtually nothing in the way of corporate or business and management history.

Apart from illustrative references—called case studies but usually no more than summarized snapshot examples used to explain the workings of some functional management disciplines—the subjects were (and still are) even neglected at business schools, where management educators were teaching the nation’s future businessmen how to manage without the perspectives of their predecessors or an awareness of their corporate past. It was equivalent to Britain’s Sandhurst, the armed forces academy that trains the nation’s future military leaders, not referring to World War I and II, the Korean War, the Falklands, or the Gulf wars in their classrooms.