Journalist Alicia Clegg keeps coming back to the topic of authenticity. We cited her Business Week piece “The Myth of Authenticity” in our book, and now she’s written “Historians looking to the future” for the Financial Times.
In it, she discusses how “in defiance of the downturn” a wide range of companies “are using milestone anniversaries to celebrate their heritage” — and are benefiting from in-house or for-hire “corporate archivists” or historians, to delve into the past and bring that heritage forward. I love her main point: “The focus of the new, more professional business archivist has shifted from conserving memorabilia to advancing business goals.” Amen!
So I asked my personal favorite corporate historian, Phyllis Barr (known as Lady History, but more formally President of Corporate Culture Marketing by Barr Consulting Services) for a comment. She told me how companies should understand that an archive is “so much more than data. It is the repository of a company’s DNA, its corporate culture, its ‘who, what, why, where, when and how.’ It is a company’s ‘hiStory’ in tangible form and formats.”
Her recommendation: appoint a corporate historian to create a “knowledge bank” — not all at once, but over time — from which you can then draw to leverage your heritage, whether for milestone anniversaries or as an ongoing way of rendering authenticity.
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