Corporate Amnesia: Keeping Know-how in the Company

Front Cover
Taylor & Francis Group, 1998 - Business & Economics - 194 pages
Corporate Amnesia establishes organizational memory (OM), the company-specific knowledge accrued from experience, as an essential and powerful management tool.



Organizational memory is an intellectual asset that is unique to every company - probably the most important constituent of any institution's durability. Without it (the author defines this state as corporate amnesia) companies have little experiential advantage because they can't benefit from their own hindsight.

Corporate Amnesia examines this hitherto disregarded corporate competency and relates how organizations of all kinds can manage this emigrating resource to good advantage. This book demonstrates how OM's employment can profitably address many of the tenure- and experience-related problems that workplace discontinuity has imposed on Western industry in recent years.

Directors and managers in all types of organization will be able to manage their organizational memory within their own operations after reading this book. This unique guide to experiential learning will provides stimulating reading for business management academics and students.

Arnold Kransdorff is a business historian who specialises in knowledge management issues with London-based Pencorp Group, which helps companies cope with the stop-start consequences of a constantly changing workforce.

He spent 10 years at the Financial Times as a specialist management writer and industrial commentator, where he was awarded the Industrial Writer of the Year prize for his coverage of management issues. He has also received another award of excellence from Anbar Management Intelligence, the world's leading guide to management journal literature. He is the project manager and editor of 15 books - among them histories for Abbey National, RMC Group, Slough Estates, Ibstock Johnsen, the TSB, MFI Premier Brands and Telecom Eireann.

He is a member of the Association of Business Historians in the UK, the European Business History Association and the Business History Conference in the US.







Unique, stimulating guide to experiential learning
Explains how short enterprise tenure has provided industry with one of its single biggest damaging influences on productivity and competitiveness
Spells out how companies can manage their Organizational Memory more professionally

About the author (1998)

An award-winning former writer for the Financial Times, Arnold Kransdorff is a business historian specialising in Knowledge Management issues with London-based Pencorp Group, which helps companies cope with imposed change and the stop-start consequences of a constantly changing workforce. He has been closely involved with developing the use of oral research techniques in management development, succession planning and post-implementation reviews, as well as the more effective employment of corporate and product history in the workplace. Companies for which he has managed projects include Glaxo Wellcome, NM Rothchild, Abbey National, RMC Group, Slough Estates, Ibstock Johnsen, the TSB, MFI, Premier Brands, Jeffersom Smurfit and Telecom Eireann.

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