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Corporate amnesia is a phrase used to describe a situation in which businesses, and other types of co-operative organization, lose their memory of how to do things. The condition is held, by some people, to be analogous to individual amnesia. The causes are various. Employees have an inherent short and selective memory recall alongside a defensiveness that screens out unwelcome events with which they and their employer are involved.〔Alan M. Kantrow, “The Constraints of Corporate Tradition”, Harper & Row, New York. 1984〕 Flanking this are the effects of the single biggest change in workplace practice for at least a century - the actively encouraged flexible labor market. In many countries employee turnover - the rate at which old employees leave and new ones arrive - is now above the recognised annual danger level of 10%〔Professor Peter Boxall and Dr Erling Rasmussen, research study, University of Auckland Business School, October 2001〕 in many industry sectors where productivity starts to be affected. What happens is that the knowledge and experience known as organizational memory (OM) - the unrecorded event-specific, organization-specific and time-specific ‘how’ of know-how that characterizes any organization's ability to perform - walks out of the front door on a regular basis. Jobs change was initially related to downsizing but it is now a general feature of the labor market, where, on average, annual employee churn exceeds 20% in many countries and up 60% in some industries. == Cost == Firstly, the organization has to continually re-learn its tried-and-tested practice. Induction periods of up to 12 months are typical – and expensive, with direct costs variously calculated at 46% of annual pay for a front-line employee to 240% for a middle manager.〔Washington-based Corporate Leadership Council, 1998〕 Secondly, the body of evidence that would otherwise be available for better decision-making is reduced, a situation that affects the ability of organizations to learn efficiently from their own experiences. By encouraging high levels of job churn, organizations have consciously chosen to operate in isolation to their own hard-won and expensively acquired experience, depending on others’ unrelated experiences. This is even more expensive than having to re-learn, with experiential non-learning estimated by an international management consultant to cost up to 9.7% of gross domestic product in many developed countries.〔Proudfoot Consulting, September 2005〕 Thirdly, with the relationship between knowledge and power intimately linked, the corporate body has – quite deliberately and entirely unwittingly – allowed their command to be displaced. No longer are individuals an aggregate part of an established institution. Individuals are the institution for as long as they remain in situ. Then, when the face changes the institution changes, or, more accurately, tries to change, bereft of its continuity and at the mercy of new brooms. Ordered evolution has become a shapeless revolution with such things as corporate culture, ethos, values and tried and tested usage struggling to maintain an even keel. In effect, the motor of the wealth machine has largely disempowered itself. The cost of this is incalculable. Also known as institutional forgetting, corporate amnesia is among the biggest constraints to decision making excellence and a massive contributor to productivity shortfalls. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Corporate amnesia」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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