Tanaka Business School academic awarded MIT Beckhard Prize, 7 November 2005

Professor Nelson Phillips from Imperial’s Tanaka Business School is one of three academics to be awarded this year’s prestigious Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize.

One of the founders and architects of the field of organisational development, Professor Richard Beckhard was a member of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty for more than 20 years.

Awarded by the MIT Sloan Management Review (SMR), the Prize is awarded to the authors of the most outstanding article published by the SMR on planned change and organisational development published in the previous academic year. 

Professor Phillips and his co-authors, Professor Pablo Martin de Holan of the Instituto de Empresa in Spain and Professor Thomas B. Lawrence of the Simon Fraser University, Canada wrote “Managing Organisational Forgetting”. 

The article is based upon the premise that, although companies often focus on creating organisational processes and structures that allow them to learn quickly, an organisation's effectiveness is equally determined by what it chooses to remember, to unlearn or not to learn in the first place. 

"In other words, real learning and real growth require a selective, discriminating and active approach to acquiring, utilising and disposing of knowledge,” said Professor Phillips. 

"We tried to lay out how systems increase the overall effectiveness of companies by figuring out what they must remember and what they must forget and by monitoring what they forget, to ensure that valuable knowledge and skill is not forgotten,” he said. “We also described the kinds of forgetting mechanisms that organisations will need to adapt to ever changing environmental circumstances, and made suggestions for how to enhance the whole knowledge acquisition and retention process as organisations cope. 

“The framework for Organisational Forgetting has been used in Tanaka Business School’s MBA and Executive MBA programmes, so we are able to further enhance the learning experience for our students by offering them the very latest in management education research.” 

Notes to editors 

1. The article, “Managing Organisational Forgetting”, can be found in the MIT Sloan Management Review, Winter 2004, Volume 45, Number 3, pp. 45–51  

2. The Beckhard Prize was established in 1984 by the MIT Sloan School of Business upon Professor Beckhard's retirement and renamed the Richard Beckhard Memorial Prize after his death in 1999. This year's panel of judges included three distinguished members of the MIT Sloan School of Management faculty: Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus Edgar H. Schein, Society of Sloan Fellows Professor Eleanor D.Westney and Sloan Distinguished Professor of Management JoAnne Yates.  

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Consistently rated in the top three UK university institutions, Imperial College London is a world leading science-based university whose reputation for excellence in teaching and research attracts students (11,000) and staff (6,000) of the highest international quality. Innovative research at the College explores the interface between science, medicine, engineering and management and delivers practical solutions that enhance the quality of life and the environment - underpinned by a dynamic enterprise culture. Website: www.imperial.ac.uk

Imperial College’s Tanaka Business School is a world-class provider of business education and research, focusing primarily on Imperial strengths in innovation and entrepreneurship, finance, and healthcare management. It offers full-time and executive MBAs, Masters’ programmes in Finance, Risk Management, Health Management and Management; and a PhD programme. The Financial Times currently ranks Tanaka Business School as 4th in Europe for research excellence, 10th in the world for its Executive MBA and 1st in Europe and 5th in the world for entrepreneurship. 

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