Overview
Corporate Amnesia: Keeping Know-How in the Company treats organizational memory as a management asset: the accumulated, company-specific understanding created through decisions, mistakes, relationships, and repeated work.
Kransdorff's warning is straightforward. When experienced people leave and their knowledge is not retained, an organization loses more than isolated facts. It loses its ability to benefit from its own hindsight. New employees then repeat old investigations, rediscover exceptions, and make decisions without the context that shaped earlier choices.
Why it matters for handovers
A handover should preserve the reasoning behind the work, not only a list of files and recurring tasks. That means asking about history, unusual cases, prior failures, trusted relationships, and the signals an experienced employee has learned to notice.
For Flamekeeper, the useful lesson is that continuity is built from organizational memory. Capturing who owns a process matters; capturing why it works that way makes the record far more durable.