A note on Corporate Memory

Oils on Board (digitally multiplied from single image)

With recent news of corporation bosses demanding more from their employees, it makes me wander back to the many examples over my career when working for or with a cooperation I've noticed the lack of memory these entities have.

On personal basis, when a young engineer, thrown into a site working a 12 hour a day 7 day a week, we threw our all in. Arriving on site at 6.45 to set everything up, not leaving till 10pm while writing reports. The corporate data showed that from 22 to 32 engineers threw their all in, would travel wherever, stay away from home for 4 weeks or 2 months at a time. But then they would slow down, most thought this was probably because we started to settle down, have other responsibilities, partners, children. However there were some who kept going, until another event occurred, new managers. The corporate memory is only as good as its staff. A new manager has two effects: firstly they have no idea how wiped out you may be from years of over working, secondly they may have the philosophy that everything the previous manager did was incorrect and therefore they want to start all over again with new processes.

I remember in 2011, sitting in a company rented flat with the first TV I had had in over a decade. I watched a show on the top 40 female artists of the decade (00's).. it became apparent to me that I had clearly missed something. The only artist I recognised was Madonna and as the last song I had sang along to hers was Material Girl (not a fan of 90's Madonna, sorry), I was definitely missing something. How could I not know any of these people, this was 'my era' surely?

Then I got a new set of managers.. and they kept changing.They had no idea who we were, who had slogged away for them for the last decade, they hired a whole bunch of bright new things and gave them all the positions, we became the unwanted bodies filling desks with no set projects, so we left in dribs and drabs feeling under appreciated and stuck in a rut. Was it that we now had partners/ children and weren't ready to commit to losing another decade of culture or was it that we were sidelined as the previous managers 'bright new things'?

So I would propose that maybe the reason we work less hard as we get older, is simply that experience has taught us that we're just going to get a new manager, who will throw everything we've been doing out of the window or will have no knowledge of what's been done before. Years of work now clumped into, at best a project with a single word or monetary figure attached to it. 

This lack of memory has other issues beyond the employees. Any corporation that works within its community can develop issues. The public surrounding it remember past actions and events. They never have the full picture, but the corporation that did, is now different personnel and they have no knowledge. It leads to embarrassments, poor relations, at worse negligence claims. Is it the corporations fault? How is an individual to know another individual's mind? When it boils down to it, is it not a ridiculous assumption to think that a company would have a memory? Why? There may be personnel that have been there for years and know what happened. Do they have any authority? Are they silenced/ignored/ unaware of an issue as its not trickled down to them? It could be any of these. There will be willful ignoring on things. A report written and shelved, but even in those instances how apparent would the report be to a new person coming in?

Why really am I mulling the larger context of corporations' memories? Is it because some incredibly rich business men don't think their staff are working hard enough, or is it more a concern that if we rely too heavily on corporations in our global structures we're going to run into the issues that they are not an entity with any recognition/knowledge of the past, they are an ever changing rotating door with people flowing in and out. Do we honestly expect a bit of metal and glass to do anything beyond open and close?

Note:

As close as I'm getting to a blog- but as the painting is not at all abstract, I thought I would better explain why I did it - an image conjured into my mind as I was writing the above. I hope that it at least partly succeeds but I do feel if you are having to explain the art, you've probably failed in the execution a little bit...