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McDonald: Let me expand on that point a bit. It seems to me that history in business is not useful just as a kind of academic or intellectual exercise. It has to do with an established set of facts—in the same way that a financial exhibit has to do with an established set of numbers—which one then has to interpret. An underlying concept or vision is fundamental to all the major decisions that get made at the top of a corporation. One of the most important things a CEO can say is, “This is our philosophy, this is the general direction in which we are going, this is the perspective from which we need to view the issues before us at the moment.” Having a historical concept supplies a solid reference point.In fact, when I was overseas, we used to have a saying that in McKinsey’s practice we could export ways of thinking about a problem but we could not export solutions. In each case we had to go back to the thought process itself in order to come up with the appropriate solutions because each case took place in a different historical and cultural context, in a different environment.
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Now, if you don’t have this kind of idea or historical perspective, there is an enormous temptation to make a managerial mistake that could be financially traumatic—and to make it simply by using aspiration instead of reality in the decision framework. You just don’t want to be in the position of going to your board and saying the situation you face is unique, has never confronted human beings before, and demands a course of action no one has ever tried. True, no two sets of circumstances are ever entirely identical, but often there is a general pattern which does repeat from setting to setting.Chandler: This goes back, of course, to one of the oldest problems of all: reinventing the wheel. Much of this goes on. Just think of the problems that exist between marketers and production people and of the people who talk about those problems as if they were something new. Well, they’re not.
