Kraft’s decision to invoke the past to pull people together may have been intuitive, but its success is consistent with a finding of many scholars: A shared history is a large part of what binds individuals into a community and imbues a group with a distinct identity.

The present according to the historian and philosopher David Carr, “gets its sense from the background of comparable events to which it belong. Discovering or rediscovering the story, picking up the thread, reminding ourselves where we stand, where we have been and where we are going these are as important for groups as for individuals.

To lead with a sense of history is not to be a slave to the past but, rather, to acknowledge its power. A company’s store of experience its evolving culture and capabilities, its development within the broader contexts in which it has competed, and its interactions with government and other forces.

shapes the choices executives have to make and influences how people think about the future. Great leaders respect and honor that basic truth. They don’t ignore history until the time comes to plan their organization’s next anniversary. And though they may not view themselves as historians, they find it useful to think and talk about the past

Conventional problem solving begins with two questions: What is the problem? and How can it be fixed? It is more unusual to ask, How did we get to this point? But unless you pose that question, explains Michael Watkins, who has written on the best use of an executive’s first 90 days in office, “you risk tearing down fences without knowing why they were put up.

Armed with insight into the history, you may indeed find the fence is not needed and must go. Or you may find there is a good reason to leave it where it is.” A company’s history invariably shapes the way its management thinks about vision, strategy, and entrepreneurship, and decisions made in the past often constrain the available solutions.

The reality is that we are all historians when it comes to making decisions. The ability to identify opportunities or problems in the present (and to frame aspirations for the future) inevitably grows out of personal experience augmented by our broader societal knowledge of what has come before.

As the great historian of business strategy and organization Alfred D. Chandler Jr. never tired of asking his Harvard Business School classes and colleagues, “How can you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been?” So it doesn’t surprise us when we meet business leaders who have undergraduate degrees in history or whose leisure reading is dominated by history and biography.

The article reprinted here stands on its own, of course, but it can also be seen as a crucial contribution to a debate that began in 1977, when Harvard Business School professor Abraham Zaleznik published an HBR article with the deceptively mild title “Managers and Leaders: Are They Different?” The piece caused an uproar in business schools.

the half filled with inspiration, vision, and the full spectrum of human drives and desires. The study of leadership hasn’t been the same since.
“What Leaders Really Do,” first published in 1990, deepens and extends the insights of the 1977 article.