No History, No Inheritance

The omissions include the dismissive attitude toward the necessary component of seamlessness and continuity. History is a diverse medium that would otherwise bestow an inheritance on future managers/employees and a discipline within which is buried the detail of prior experience. One of the yardsticks for most other professions—music, architecture, art, soldiering, politics, and so on—is that their generic history is recognized and used as a separate field of learning. This is not so in business. Both business history (the more general historical study of the subject that builds a general appreciation of the contribution of single enterprises into the wider sector, industry, and national economic context) and corporate/management history (the memoir of individual companies or other institutional bodies) are studiously avoided as a serious teaching tool in most curricula as well as in the workplace, where subject companies’ main motivation for their own memoirs is public relations. Only the United States has given the genre any serious attention, albeit in a small number of top universities; Harvard is the only one where business history is a compulsory component of all first-year student teaching. In truth, history is the single biggest source of available knowledge, all too often perceived as obsolete because of its outdated character. Its brush-off is often characterized by the parroting of Henry Ford’s pronouncement that “history is more or less bunk” (Chicago Tribune, 1916), and its widely held derivatives “old lessons are misleading or irrelevant because times change” and “one must only look forward, not backward.”