125348823 | Our History © Jakub Krechowicz | Dreamstime.com
More than a decade ago, Penny Burns set up an AM history group in LinkedIn. Her idea was firstly to collect people’s own stories, of how they came to be involved in Asset Management.
Last year Talking Infrastructure published Penny’s own history, of how she came to create Asset Management in 1984 and her first decade working with it. (The Story of Asset Management.)
From when AM really took off in the 1990s, it’s much harder to collect all the strands, and the stories include many other people. That’s why volume two of the history would look very different.
I am still fascinated by the personal journeys – not least because it brings out what distinguishes AM from other disciplines (why do people leave engineering, for example?)
I also have things when I teach about the wider history, but these really come from the people I have met, that I have happened to meet. And what I remember of what they said twenty or twenty five years ago, that they may not even agree with (or remember in the same way).
And the internet, even with AI, doesn’t cover most of it. We erase it when we rewrite a website, unless we consciously refer to what came before (or look up old sites in an archive project). I cannot find that old LinkedIn group, even though I don’t think anyone actually removed it.
Perhaps it’s natural that some only really think about history, and legacy, as they come to the end of their working lives. When you first meet a topic like Asset Management, you just know it’s there, not where it came from.
But it seems to me that asset managers ought to be interested, because we must have a good sense of time and change to do our jobs. “If you don’t know your history, you don’t know where you’re coming from,” as Bob Marley nearly put it. Understanding what’s happened before is the base material for having any sense of what may happen next, in ideas as well as deterioration curves.
Volume 2 is not yet a project. But Talking Infrastructure is planning longer articles on key topics such as planning and risk, and how to mine SAM newsletter material. Not the final word on anything, probably, but the next word, or part of the picture. A resource that can help us remember.
Watch this site for some more notes on our collective history.
And share your own story and memories of how it evolved for you.
The ‘Story of Asset Management’ took about 2.5 years to write – but figuring out what to write took over 10 years! I decided to break the story down into decades and then to write about the first decade, leaving the next decades for volumes 2, 3 etc but Ruth is right, collecting and analysing all the different threads is no easy task – and, frankly, I am no longer up to it. However, in 1994 I started publishing the Asset Management Quarterly, which, in 1999, became the fortnightly Strategic Asset Management. Here I looked for what was new and what we needed to think about.
Those issues now provide a timeline of both the issues and the leading practitioners of the day. All 400 issues of SAM (from Jan 1999 to September 2014) are being prepared for re-issue. Future AM historians can trace developments, and current Asset Managers can enjoy articles that explore the what and the why, that helps to make more sense of today’s focus on the how – written simply because this was a simpler time. And to make it easier to ‘go back in time’, articles are being categorised. We will let you know when this work is finished and you are able to access.