The Editorials of Memories #1 The Long View
We have read Richard Fisher’s book The long view: Why we need to transform how the world sees time for you. By sheer coincidence, one of the examples chosen in the book is historical companies. This leads us to a concept we have always been familiar with at Promemoria: businesses with a long history are naturally destined to last. But how does this work?
The archive: a rear-view mirror to look ahead
We have read Richard Fisher’s book The long view: Why we need to transform how the world sees time for you. We have followed this author for many years for his work at the The Long Now Foundation, a non-profit foundation dedicated to restoring our perception of time and nurturing a long-term vision.
The subtitle reveals Fisher’s secret goal: trying to save humanity. But we are not so naive as to believe that humanity can be saved or is worth saving, thus we shall mold the main concepts of the book, decontextualize them, and reformulate them in the name of a more noble goal: handling archives, businesses, and the human memory to understand something more about ourselves.
Make an archive or die
Richard Fisher started from the past, because the best way to learn how to survive is, of course, to imitate the strategies of those who have managed to build a “long future”. By sheer coincidence, one of the examples chosen in the book is historical companies. This leads us to a concept we have always been familiar with at Promemoria: businesses with a long history are naturally destined to last.
But how does it work?
The point is that “things” are not like people, at least in terms of their longevity. For people, life expectancy declines as the years go by, but for “things”, time seems to go backward: if you meet an “old thing” along your path, that “thing” will still have a long life to live [1].
This statement is slightly counterintuitive, but we shall explain it hereinafter.
If you think about it, it is rather rare to run into something that is exactly at the beginning or the end of its life cycle. It is much likelier to encounter it sometime in between. This makes us formulate a kind of law: something’s age is a predictive factor of its duration.
If you look at businesses, you immediately realize that the mortality rate of startups is much higher than that of historical companies. Here is another law: if you want to know how long a business is destined to last, ask its registration date. That’s the trick: investing in one’s history.
Stories of long-lasting companies
Historians argue that the machine that drove the Industrial Revolution was not the steam engine, but the clock, because clocks could synchronise people.
The long view retraces the stories of some of the oldest companies in history. There is a focus on Japan, a country boasting over 33,000 historical companies known as shinise (ancient workshops). The most surprising reason behind the longevity of Japanese firms is the practice of erecting family businesses through adoption. Whilst in the Western world a company can be family-based or management-based, there is a third route in Japan: adopting a family member who is destined to lead a company (in Japan, 90% of adoptions concern adults, not children). It seems like it is adoption itself that triggers a long-term vision required to steer a business entity past the threats of time.
Presentism
This is the issue.
One of the theories outlined in the book is that most businesses die before achieving their full potential.
In this scope, Fisher quotes Arie de Geus, a former manager at Shell:
No living species suffers from such a discrepancy between its maximum life expectancy and the average span it realizes […] If you look at them in light of what they could be, however, most commercial corporations are underachievers. They exist at an early stage of evolution; they develop and exploit only a small fraction of their potential.
The culprit is a time-related pathology known as presentism, a concept introduced by François Hartog in his book Régimes d’historicité. Présentisme et expériences du temps.
Presentism is a perception of time without which an archive would have a much greater market value than a big corporation: human beings are extremely focused on the present, and do not sufficiently value the past or future.
In the corporate world, presentism finds expression in two strictly related areas:
- quarterly reporting
- the tyranny of goals
The trimestral system of corporate management imposes the achievement of goals in a very short time. The goals, in turn, cause strategies that are toxic, in the long term, and lead to decreases in investment in research and development, new hires, patent registrations, and communication. These decisions are made with a short-term perspective, which shortens a company’s future.
How to become Japanese
So, are we destined to perish in the West? Most likely. But if we wish to isolate the common elements of those which a recent research study defines deep-time organizations [4], we can say that there is a cultural factor behind corporate longevity.
For instance, the presence of women on corporate boards seems to favor a long-term vision [5], as does sensitivity toward the outside world, the ability to “ignore the noise” generated by short-termism and the tyranny of key performance indicators (that tend to turn goals into units of measure to calculate success).
The idea that we would like to nurture relates to the need to sacrifice a part of one’s trimestral achievements in place of a – so to speak – epochal success. Perhaps one that is less measurable, less visible, and more difficult to picture, but certainly larger in quantitative terms, as it is the result of an accumulation that generates value from value.
History of a futureless man
Among the many case studies mentioned in the book, there is a story that suits us well. It is the story of Kent Cochrane, a Canadian man who, following a motorcycle accident, suffered from a particular form of amnesia. Cochrane was perfectly able to remember names and facts (semantic memory) but had lost the ability to recall the events of his past (episodic memory). Surprisingly, the doctors found out that the loss of episodic memory was directly correlated to his ability to imagine the future: he couldn’t predict or picture anything that could happen to him in the future, because the human ability to mentally travel through time lies in episodic memory.
Daniel Kahneman, the author of the bestseller Thinking, fast and slow, passed away a few days ago. Kahneman claimed that most of our cognitive biases are based on our mind’s intrinsic inability to correctly process time.
What we can do as memory workers is push the limits of the mind, attempt to instill the sense of time in businesses, and use archives to place the corporate vision in a broader time frame.
To paraphrase our motto, the archive can become the mirror reflecting an image of the past in a vision of the future.