We sometimes talk about the impossibility of being completely honest by asking questions such as, “Have you ever taken a paper clip or pen from work? If so, you are a thief!” But during business mergers, acquisitions and liquidations, something much greater is lost: corporate history.
I’ve worked at a couple of organizations that completed one or more mergers or acquisitions. After talking with some people who were “merged” or “acquired,” I got the impression that one of the most disappointing aspects for them was seeing how their company history no longer seemed relevant or useful to their new leadership.
This photo was taken more than 20 years ago to commemorate the expansion of a paper machine at the Fort James Corporation Savannah River Mill near Rincon, GA. I came across it recently when I cleaned a closet in my home office. It would have been tossed into a dumpster long ago if I had not decided to keep it years before.
The photo was sent in the late 1990s to Fort James executives in the Deerfield, IL headquarters, and soon found its way to the company’s Corporate Communications Department, where I worked. As with many such photos and trinkets from corporate events, the photo was displayed prominently for a short time, and then moved into a storage closet.
We came across it early in 2001 following Georgia Pacific’s acquisition of Fort James. We were packing material to send to the GP communications staff. But they didn’t want the photos we had collected. Their focus was on GP; the history of Fort James was not important enough to worry about at the time.
As we disposed of our files that were not wanted by our GP counterparts, I came across this photo. The consensus of the communications staff was that GP would not care for it. I liked the image, was impressed by seeing these large machines in action, and asked to keep the photo. No objections from my manager, so I kept that piece of company history alive for a time.
Corporate history is so much more than old photos and files. Think of the “institutional knowledge” that walks out of companies when someone retires, leaves for a new company, or dies. Operational playbooks can help cover the knowledge gap, but usually not without a degree of confusion and mistakes.
Are those who forget corporate history doomed to repeat it? Not always, however productivity and competitiveness can be hampered by employees and leaders who “don’t know what they don’t know.”
