“No company starts out as a cumbrous bureaucracy, but most end up that way. As an organization grows, layers get added, staff groups swell, rules proliferate, and compliance costs mount. Once a company hits a certain threshold of complexity — around two to three hundred employees — bureaucracy starts growing faster than the organization itself.” — Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini, Humanocracy 2.0
Infantile amnesia, scientists say, occurs because the developing brain generates so many new neurons that it overwrites its own memories. Moving forward means letting go. In a sense, our earliest self is sacrificed to growth.
Nietzsche saw this phenomenon as a feature, rather than a flaw.
“A little tabula rasa of consciousness to make room for something new, above all for the nobler functions and functionaries… that, as I said, is the benefit of active forgetfulness, like a doorkeeper or guardian of mental order, rest and etiquette… there could be no happiness, cheerfulness, hope, pride, immediacy, without forgetfulness.” — Friedrich Nietzsche
In Nietzsche’s view, the mind actively suppresses certain memories — a “little tabula rasa” — so that we are not forever weighed down by what came before. Some amount of forgetting is essential to moving forward, to clearing space for growth and reinvention. But the flip side is also true. Too much forgetting can mean that we lose our essence, while, too little, means we can’t evolve.
This tension between memory and innovation, between past and future is not just a human one. It applies to organisations too.
As organisations (and careers) mature, they undergo their own version of childhood amnesia. They forget the scrappy experiments that shaped them. They forget the cultural risks that paid off. They forget what it was like to struggle, to be unknown, to be underdogs.
Instead, they institutionalise. They hire for scale, no longer for energy and attitude. They codify culture into handbooks, standard operating procedures, and compliance frameworks. They fire their entrepreneurs and reward the optimisers. Over time, employees focus more on protecting their careers — and those of their bosses — than on protecting the edge that made the company remarkable.
This is something we explored on the Innovation Show with Greg Satell and Paul Nunes. Paul framed it plainly:
“Should we fire the entrepreneurs in the company? Well, if we’re trying to scale, yes. If I’m Starbucks, I don’t need someone telling me every day the logo should be blue. I need someone who can make 50,000 stores exactly the same, as fast and as cheaply as possible. The problem is, when those stores start to look obsolete, you suddenly want the entrepreneurs again — but you’ve already fired them. So you’re left asking: What’s the next play? What’s the next act? And the people who might have answered that are long gone.”
In that moment — when what worked no longer works — you don’t need more process. You need entrepreneurial memory. You need to remember who you were before you forgot.
The Girl Who Remembered Too MuchThe Girl Who Remembered Too Much
In 1948, in Madhya Pradesh, India, a girl named Swarnlata Mishra began to sing Bengali folk songs no one had taught her. She performed dances from another region, dances she never had the opportunity to learn — an example of xenoglossy, the rare phenomenon where someone appears to speak a language they could not have acquired by natural means.She described, in intricate detail, a life she claimed to have lived in a town over 300 kilometres away. Her family, confused and sceptical, eventually investigated.
What they found astonished them. Everything she described matched the life of Biya Pathak, a woman who had died years earlier. When Swarnlata was introduced to Biya’s surviving relatives, she recognised them by name, used private family nicknames, and recounted incidents no outsider could have known.
The late psychiatrist Dr Ian Stevenson spent decades researching such cases, collecting thousands of accounts of children who recalled lives they had never lived — at least not in any rational, linear sense. Swarnlata’s case was among the most rigorously documented. Over fifty of her statements were later verified as accurate.
Stevenson didn’t claim proof of reincarnation. But he did claim this: sometimes, forgetting isn’t complete. Sometimes, what we are supposed to leave behind lingers just beneath the surface, waiting for the right conditions to resurface.
Science has long side-eyed such phenomena. But even the sceptic must pause. Whether literal or not, these stories hint that forgetting is never total and that remembering might be the beginning of something extraordinary.
Just as Swarnlata’s recollections returned uninvited but unmistakable, organisations too can find themselves stirred by echoes of an earlier self. One of the clearest examples of this corporate remembering: Burberry.
Forgetting the Fabric of Identity: Burberry Forgets
There was a time when a Burberry coat wasn’t worn to be seen, but to shelter from the weather.
Founded in 1856, Burberry’s earliest identity was woven from necessity. In the late 1870s Thomas Burberry invented gabardine, a tightly woven, breathable, rain-resistant fabric. It clothed farmers and fishermen, explorers and British soldiers in WW1. It stood between the British body and the British weather. The iconic check, now broadcast on runways and Instagram feeds, was once hidden in the lining.
But as decades passed and the brand expanded, that lining made its way outside. The check moved from being a quiet signature to a brash (chav) signal. Licensing spiralled. The pattern popped up on baseball caps, handbags, even dog bowls. The association with football hooliganism led to the wearing of Burberry check garments being banned at some venues. In the early 2000s, Burberry found itself in crisis.
When Angela Ahrendts took over as CEO, she noticed something during the first strategic planning session. Sixty senior leaders flew in from around the world to London. The day was cold and grey. Not one of them wore a Burberry trench coat. Burberry had grown, but it had forgotten its origins. Each of its 23 global licensees operated with different visions. The trench coat — its north star — had been demoted to the sidelines. The brand’s story was incoherent.
Rather than reinvent the brand, Ahrendts chose to remember it.
She centralised design — appointing a “brand czar.” She pulled the trench coat from the archive and brought it back to the spotlight. And then she asked a simple question: What if we innovated at the core? Not by discarding the past, but by resurfacing it for the next generation — millennials, digital natives, the luxury customers of the future.
For a while, it worked. Burberry became coherent again. It was no longer a check pattern in search of a product. It was a trench coat company, moving forward with confidence.
But, like innovation, reinvention and any transformation effort, memory is a practice, not a one-time act.
In recent years, the brand lost the thread to its past again — experimenting with streetwear reinventions, monogram rebrands, and a detour from what made it credible in the first place. The results were mixed.
In Q2 of 2025, Burberry reappeared on Lyst’s global hottest brands ranking after a yearlong absence. Not only that — it landed at 17th place, ahead of Gucci, Birkenstock, and Valentino.
The reason? A resurgent “Cool Britannia” spirit. A strong festival campaign. A growing menswear presence. Not a full reincarnation, perhaps — but a remembering of its roots.
It’s too soon to say if this signals a true remembering. But it serves as a reminder that even brands can forget — and sometimes, remember again.
Next time you consider a transformation or reinvention. Just think maybe your organisation doesn’t need a new strategy. Maybe it just needs to remember who it used to be.
That episode of the Innovation Show X with friends Paul Nunes and Greg Satell
https://medium.com/media/d678cdc92ff0e2a89574140bf717ef14/href
Echoes of a Forgotten Self: On Past Lives, Infantile Amnesia, and Organisational Origins was originally published in The Thursday Thought on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.