The Cost of Corporate Amnesia

Corporate loss of memory matters when the business loses sight of what has made it successful. In this article, David Molian, Criticaleye Thought Leader and Visiting Fellow at Cranfield School of Management, writes about the importance of retaining a strong sense of company identity, which ensures successes are celebrated and mistakes are not airbrushed out of history.

Key points include:

• Forgetting history is almost inevitable unless a conscious effort is made to keep it alive and learn the lessons from it.
• The best candidate as successor to knowledge management is almost certainly artificial intelligence, serving as database management.
• An organisation must be courageous enough to reflect honestly on its mistakes and resist the natural urge to airbrush these from its history.
• The bigger a business gets, the more reliant it becomes on systems, processes and procedures. It is necessary to Review these periodically and cull what is unnecessary or redundant as bureaucracy for its own sake.