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Knowledge Management is conventionally used as a way of recording institution-specific ‘knowledge' in an easily-accessible digital format. Arnold Kransdorff's three books - ‘ Corporate Amnesia' , ‘ Corporate DNA' and ‘ Knowledge Management: Begging for a Bigger Role' - take the infant subject of KM, only slightly more than a decade old, to its next level by giving it a new and powerful application to combat the damaging side effects of the way business is now done. For the first time they give this expensive management tool a formal educational role in the key discipline of decision making. ‘Corporate Amnesia', his first book – published in 1998 and subsequently short listed for the UK's management book of the year - identified the emerging phenomenon of corporate amnesia sweeping the workplace as countries and organisations instituted the new workplace stratagem known as the flexible labour market. It outlines how organizations, which typically revel in their ability to hire ‘n fire, almost at will, can efficiently and cost-effectively capture their short-, medium- and long-term memory so that they have an accurate and enduring record of when and what they did. Whilst the author recognised the association between memory and the ability to learn from experience, the process of linking the two is still an informal one. For the few institutions that also recognise this, random osmosis is the process by which ‘walkabout' managers are expected to benefit from the newly-presented awareness of prior experience. But organisations continue to repeat their mistakes, reinvent the wheel and even appearing to not learn from their successes, the evidence for which is widespread. Experiential non- learning is still epidemic, despite Information Technology (IT) and continuous training courses that are meant to keep rolling short-tenure individuals up to date. The formalisation of a methodology to tackle the impact of experiential non-learning emerged when Arnold Kransdorff married his capture techniques with the ‘reflective' process developed by Professor David Kolb, the acknowledged expert in experiential learning out of Weatherhead School of Management at Case Western Reserve University. Up to then, rarely-used contemplative techniques – the gold standard of experiential learning - used only current practice as the evidential source for better decision making but the corporate amnesia resulting from the high level of jobs churn is limiting any edifying advantage. What the author's methodology brings to the table is institutional-specific prior experience and an adapted Kolb-style learning process, giving experiential learning its wider and more precise definition in the modern working environment. ‘Corporate DNA' and ‘Knowledge Management: Begging for a Bigger Role' , his second and third books, outline a methodology with an emphasis on the capture of non-explicit tacit knowledge – the important ‘how' of know-how - to provide ‘walkabout' employees with both prior and current practice in the pursuit of better decision making. All three books could have been sub-titled ‘ How to better learn the lessons of business history '.
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