No Inheritance

Alongside this and against the background of the accelerating demise of the job-for-life work model, very few British companies were passing down their own experiences from one generation to the next. It also seemed strange that apprenticeships—the side-by-side training process whereby a youth acquired proficiency by inheriting both the skills and the experiences of an elder mentor—had been abandoned.

By way of contrast, the level of activity in corporate and business history in countries like the United States, Germany, and Japan was significantly higher, although the evidence there, too, was of an underexploited resource.

For the United Kingdom at least, the author’s conclusion was that, without any corporate or business history to connect the generations, there was very little inheritance or continuity at both the wider industrial and individual organizational levels. In effect, each new generation of workers was obliged to virtually reinvent the wheel for themselves when they first entered the workforce and whenever they joined new companies. Yes, the lateral movement of employees across the workforce provided a constant source of new ideas for employers, but without access to their own employer’s hindsight, this also meant that corporate requirements were increasingly being driven in isolation to their own experiences and circumstances.

At about the time the author’s interest in OM was gestating, the importance of—and relationship between—hindsight and continuity then reinforced themselves in another event. The author was listening to a BBC radio program on heavyweight boxers in which one of the 1930s champions was explaining how he had beaten his opponent. One of his throwaway lines in the archive crackle was that the boxer had spent time examining the newsreel footage of his opponent’s previous fight and, from that, was able to derive a strategy to beat his adversary. It struck him that the film clip the boxer had seen all those years ago was, to all intents and purposes, the equivalent of OM and that the individual was using experience—this time someone else’s experience that wasn’t distorted by time or ego—as a learning tool.