Corporate History

Having a sense of vision and a long-term focus for your company are important. Knowing where you're going is a good thing. Just as important is understanding where you came from. Your history guided you to your present and sets the stage for your future, so it's important for your employees to know about it.

This is more important for Creatives than it is for other workers who do repetitive tasks. Creatives are, by definition, creative, and they're going to be coming up with new ideas and taking your firm in new directions (at least, they will if they're good). For them to do that most effectively they need to understand your firm's goals and values and the relationship between the firm and your operating environment, and they need to know what's worked and what hasn't in the past, and more importantly, WHY they have or haven't worked.

Knowing how and why your firm began will tell your Creatives something about what's expected of them. Understanding the founders' vision for the firm and what they had to do to get it going will give them a clue about what's important. Now, if your firm is old then a lot of that is likely to have changed, and if it's huge and well-known, they may already know that sort of stuff (how many new Google employees need a lesson in Google history?). But in smaller or lesser-known firms, this kind of introduction is important, as it allows your employees to better focus their creative energy in a way that advances the company.

When your employees know how and when the firm started they can also understand what the environment was like in which the company began. Was it a new competitor in an existing market, or did it create the market? What was the technology like? How were the general economic conditions compared to now? What was it that allowed the firm to launch successfully, and are those factors still in place (or even still relevant) today? When your employees can see how things outside the firm have changed they can have a better idea what the firm needs to succeed.

Creatives will develop new ideas; after all, that's why you pay them. But not every "new" idea is really new. Sometimes they'll throw out something that's been done before but either didn't work, or did but is no longer useful. Or maybe their idea didn't work before, but conditions have changed so it's a great idea now. Only by understanding your history can they have a sense of which ideas are right and which just aren't.

You don't need to write a book about your company or teach some dry lectures. Just have a talk with new employees and clue them in. We have a new guy in my office who was sitting in a meeting the other day and I could see from the look in his eyes he had no idea what we were talking about, because you really needed to know the context and the nature of our relationship with another organization to get the importance of what we were discussing. I pulled him aside afterwards for about half an hour and have him the background he needed. Already, I can see the difference in his work.

For a little effort, you'll have a bunch of Creatives who are much better prepared to contribute good ideas.