Look after your memory
In an idle moment last week I started leafing through one of my old cuttings books. As I read, a sense of wonder came over me. "Ministers tentative on EC farm plans," said one headline. The story contained details of grain subsidies and something called the co-responsibility levy, and was written in a tone of brisk confidence. "By Lucy Kellaway," it said, but did I really write that? How did I know any of that stuff? And why can't I remember a single thing about it?
Co-responsibility levies and tentative ministers have gone deep into the recycle bin of my mind, along with such items as the whereabouts of my keys, and most of the things I learnt at school and university. In fact nearly all the facts I have ever been acquainted with are now gone, beyond reach.
The contents of this bin are an endless source of puzzlement and distress to me. Why is it that I can remember the lyrics of every single song on the Beatles' White Album, even the feeble and irritating "Piggies", and yet useful, interesting things go straight into the trash?
I don't think I'm alone in this. Most people of my age obsess about their memories, though the things they delete are different. Whenever I go to visit friends with my husband, he hisses at me in a panic as we ring the doorbell: "What's his wife called?" I supply the name effortlessly and feel slightly superior for a bit, which is always nice.
You don't need to be middle-aged to be alarmed by your memory gaps. A 27-year-old colleague with a first-class English degree from Cambridge complains of having difficulty with ordinary words, forgetting the word for rug, and the other day was talking about the "small term" instead of the short term. Again, much superiority, as I never forget words.
Given my anxiety about memory, I found myself eagerly tearing off the wrapper of the MIT Sloan Management Review last week, when I saw that the cover story was called "Managing Organisational Forgetting".
The article held out much promise for the memory-obsessive. Seven pages of close-written text complete with diagrams plotting "sources of knowledge" against "modes of forgetting". There were plenty of footnotes as well as findings from an "extensive multi-year study". And the upshot? Here I hesitate. The trouble with these articles is that by the time you've got to the end you can't quite recall the beginning. But this, if my memory serves me, was the gist: forgetting is complex, but it is very important. The company that manages its memory properly will succeed and the one that does not will fail.
The article made the distinction between things companies need to remember, such as business processes, and the things they need to forget - bad or outdated habits.
The authors, Pablo Martin de Holan et al, suggested that companies should actively manage their memories, retaining the important stuff and put the toxic or outdated stuff into the recycling bin. They should find out where the useful knowledge is kept, make sure it gets exercised so it doesn't get forgotten. Equally, they should track down the bad memories and eliminate them. Or as the authors put it, a company should "disorganise some part of its knowledge store".
I write this without conviction. I have no confidence that any company would be any more able to manage its memory than I can manage mine. For a start, it is always difficult to work out which things we should remember and which we should forget.
From an examination of my own mental store I have found not two categories, but three. There are the things I would like to remember - jokes, anything scholarly and so on - and those I would like to forget, such as the rude e-mail I once wrote about my boss and sent to him by mistake. But mostly there are masses of memories of the "Piggies" variety, that are neither obviously beneficial nor harmful, just there. They are part of me and might come in handy one day.
With companies I think it is the same. Most of the knowledge in people's heads or in their computers is pretty tedious. It might be useful one day or might not be. But even if companies did know which bits were important, I very much doubt they would be able to do anything about making sure it got remembered.
Getting rid of knowledge is a different story. Here there is no parallel between organisations and humans. We cannot consciously destroy memory. By contrast, companies have a very good way of doing so: they can fire people.
The City is currently engaged in an orgy of memory loss. Since the end of 2001, 26,000 people have been fired. Now, at the first sign of a recovery they are filling the jobs with different people with different memories. This is financially ruinous, with the golden goodbyes and golden hellos, headhunters' fees and the colossal waste of management time. Yet the memory-loss effect may prove the most devastating of all. It is the corporate equivalent of a massive stroke.
Companies need to decide whether forgetting is a good or bad thing. They should ask whether they would like to err on the side of remembering their past or forgetting it. Such is the emphasis on change that most companies play fast and loose with their memories. My instinct tells me this is a mistake: if instead of getting fixated on introducing new practices they remembered what had or had not worked in the past, I suspect their businesses would flourish.
As far as managing my own memory, I'd like to be able to remember more - but only up to a point. I'm quite happy to have forgotten about the co-responsibility levy, but I'd love to be able to remember where I put my keys 管好你的记忆
上周闲来无事，我浏览自己文章的剪报本。在读到"各部长对欧共体农场计划迟疑不决"的标题时，我感到非常惊讶。这条新闻谈到了粮食补贴以及共同责任税的细节，笔调自信，署名是"露西＃凯拉韦"。可是，这真是我写的吗？我怎么会知道有关这方面的东西呢？为何我就是一点也想不起来了呢？
共同责任税也好，犹豫不决的部长们也罢，他们早被通通扔进了我大脑的"回收桶"，就像我钥匙的行踪，还有我在中学和大学所学的大多数东西一样。事实上，几乎所有我曾熟悉的事实都已被忘得精光，踪影全无了。
对我而言，大脑中的这个"回收桶"就是我困惑与苦恼的源泉。为什么甲克虫乐队《白色》专辑每首歌的歌词，包括那首听起来软绵绵的、令人讨厌的《小猪》歌词，我都烂熟于心，但那些有用而有趣的东西却像垃圾一样被直接扔进 "回收桶"了呢？
我想，这种情况不止我一人有。虽然和我同龄的大多数人遗忘的内容有所不同，但他们都为自己的记忆力苦恼万分。每次我和丈夫一起出门看朋友，每当我们按门铃时，他就会紧张起来，小声问我："他的太太叫什么？"这时，我不费吹灰之力地告诉他答案，还微微感到一种优越感，这种感觉总是很美好的。
并不是人到中年才会惊觉自己出现了记忆的鸿沟。我有一位同事，27岁，在剑桥大学拿过英文系的的一等学位，但他也抱怨自己在使用日常词汇方面有困难，不知道"小地毯"（rug)这个词怎么说，前两天，还把"短期"（short term）说成了"小期"（small term）。此时的我，又感到无比优越，因为我从不忘单词。
上周，我发现《麻省理工学院斯隆商学院管理学评论》杂志（MIT Sloan Management Review）这期的封面故事是《组织遗忘的管理》（《Managing Organisational Forgetting》）。想到自己正对记忆力焦虑不安，于是便迫不及待地撕开了杂志的包装纸。
这篇文章给正为记忆力苦恼的人带来了希望。文章密密麻麻，写满了七页，还配有图表，标明"知识的来源"，与"遗忘的模式"相对照。文后还附有大量的脚注以及调研结果，这些都来自于 "多年广泛的研究"。那么，文章的论点是什么呢？对于这个问题，我却不能马上给出答案，因为这类文章的一大麻烦就是：当你看到结尾时，差不多已经想不起开头讲了些什么。但如果我没记错的话，这篇文章旨在说明：遗忘是件复杂的事，但它非常重要。如果一家公司能妥善处理自己的"记忆"，那它就能成功；反之，它就会失败。
这篇文章对公司需要记住和遗忘的事做了分类，业务流程属于前者，有害或过时的习惯则属于后者。
这篇文章由巴勃罗＃马丁＃德＃霍兰（Pablo Martin de Holan）等人撰写。他们建议，公司应积极管理自己的"记忆"，保留重要的内容，把有害或过时的东西扔进"回收桶"；找到有用知识的储存处，确保这些知识为人所用，不致遭到遗忘；同样，他们还应找到那些不那么美好的记忆，把它们通通抹掉，用作者的话来讲，公司应"分解知识库中的部分内容"。
说这些话，我心里没底。我不敢说任何一家公司能管理好自家的"记忆"，就像我管不好自己的记忆一样。首先，什么事该记住，什么事该忘却，这个问题总是很难解决。
当我检查完自己的记忆库之后，我发现自己的记忆分为三类，而不是两类。第一类是那些我希望记住的东西，如笑话，任何有关学术的知识；第二类是我希望忘却的东西，比如，我曾写过一封措词粗鲁的电子邮件，骂我的老板，还错发给了他；但记忆库中的大部分内容，既没有明显的益处，也无明显的坏处，就像《小猪》这首歌的歌词一样，它们就存于我的记忆中。它们是我的一部分，说不定哪天就派上了用场。
就公司而言，我想，情况也是如此。人们头脑中或电脑里的大多数知识都相当单调乏味。或许，某一天，这些知识成了有用之物，或许，它们永远也派不上用场。即使公司确实知道哪些知识有用，我还是怀疑他们是否会采取措施，把它们保留下来。
至于遗忘，公司和个人的情况则完全不同。在这个问题上，组织和人类没有相似之处。人类无法刻意地消除记忆，但公司却有一个相当不错的方法来达到"丧失记忆"的目的，那就是裁员。
时下，伦敦金融城正经历一场疯狂的"记忆失落"。自2001年底至今，已有26000人被解雇。现在，又呈现出第一丝"复苏"迹象：各大公司正启用不同的人来填补这些职位空缺，这些人的记忆又各不相同。公司解雇员工需要付出一大笔辞退金，又需要以优厚的待遇招徕新人填补空缺，还要给猎头公司一定的酬金，管理人员也得付出长时间的劳动，这真是件劳民伤财的事。"记忆失落"也许是最具毁灭性的，公司就好比患了一次"大中风"。
遗忘究竟是好还是坏，公司需要作出判断。他们应该问问自己，是宁愿记住还是遗忘。这也是近来公司在这个问题上转变做法的重点：大多数公司不重视自家的"历史"，态度轻率，反复无常。本能告诉我：这种做法是错误的。如果他们不记住过去哪些做法奏效，哪些不成功，而一味地把注意力集中在引进新的做法上，我想，他们的成功之日便"遥遥无期"。
至于我自己记忆的管理，我当然希望能记住更多的东西，但只要到某个程度就够了。我很高兴自己已经忘记了有关共同责任税的文章，但我倒希望能够记起我把自己的钥匙放在了哪里。
