Corporate amnesia is a phrase used to describe a situation in which businesses, and other types of co-operative organization, lose their memory of how to do things. The condition is held, by some people, to be analogous to individual amnesia.
The causes are various. Employees have an inherent short and selective memory recall alongside a defensiveness that screens out unwelcome events with which they and their employer are involved. Flanking this are the effects of the single biggest change in workplace practice for at least a century - the actively encouraged flexible labor market. In many countries employee turnover - the rate at which old employees leave and new ones arrive - is now above the recognised annual danger level of 10% in many industry sectors where productivity starts to be affected. What happens is that the knowledge and experience known as organizational memory (OM) - the unrecorded event-specific, organization-specific and time-specific ‘how’ of know-how that characterizes any organization's ability to perform - walks out of the front door on a regular basis. Jobs change was initially related to downsizing but it is now a general feature of the labor market, where, on average, annual employee churn exceeds 20% in many countries and up 60% in some industries.
Read more about Corporate Amnesia: Cost, Knowledge Management, Organizational Memory, Capture Tools, Sabotage
Famous quotes containing the words corporate and/or amnesia:
“If when a businessman speaks of minority employment, or air pollution, or poverty, he speaks in the language of a certified public accountant analyzing a corporate balance sheet, who is to know that he understands the human problems behind the statistical ones? If the businessman would stop talking like a computer printout or a page from the corporate annual report, other people would stop thinking he had a cash register for a heart. It is as simple as that—but that isn’t simple.”
—Louis B. Lundborg (1906–1981)
“We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?”
—John Guare (b. 1938)