Past Track to the Future

In times of discontinuous and disconcerting change, the people who give comfort are those with a keen sense of the past. They've seen it all before -- the good, the bad, the ugly -- and they know that we'll see it all again. Stephen E. Ambrose, 65, thinks that history is the way to navigate the future. "The past," he says, "is a source of knowledge, and the future is a source of hope. Love of the past implies faith in the future."

Ambrose is the best-selling author of more than a half dozen histories of grand events, from the triumphs of World War II to the forging of the American West. His own career proves his point that history is a language for the future: His fascination with the past has created powerful trends in the present. His book D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (Simon & Schuster, 1994) was the basis of Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. The movie rights to his new best-seller, Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863 - 1869 (Simon & Schuster, 2000), have been optioned by Ted Turner, who outbid Spielberg.

The building of the railroad, as Ambrose tells the story, holds many lessons for business leaders working to build the new economy. Indeed, reading Ambrose, you could conclude that vast progress could only happen here. You could believe that America is the greatest country -- and organization -- that the world has ever seen, mostly because it inspires overreaching, and it tolerates failure and messiness.

Ambrose has been a historian for 45 years. Born and raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, he intended to study medicine and to take over his father's medical practice. But after hearing a college lecture on George Washington, he asked the professor, "How do I do what you do?" For business readers, what's also remarkable about Ambrose is that he is running a family business: Three of his five adult kids are trained historians with advanced degrees. They work on his research-and-development team.

When asked if he meant the title of his new book literally, he hesitated for a moment and recalled a time when he got to drive a real train: "The greatest experience is the orgasm. But tooting that whistle isn't far behind."

Spend any time in LA, and you hear the most negative thing anybody can say about another person: "That's so two seconds ago." What do you make of this allergy to the past that is especially strong in business?

It's not just true in business. When I was growing up, the worst thing you could say about something was that it was "just history." It's history. Who wants to be in that camp? But history includes just about everything that is happening today, from the elections to the exploration of the world's remaining new frontiers, such as the ocean floor.

There is nothing remote about it. You open the paper, and every story has to do with it. Every political leader or business leader has to have a knowledge of the past. Cadets at West Point know their history. Every year they go to the battlefield at Gettysburg and walk the grounds. They know history in their bodies and souls. They read about Napoleon and Grant. When you know the history of wars, you understand human motivations and plans: It is all about life or death. That understanding has a way of making the issues clear.

Cadets know history, yet they fight with different weapons today. Weapons change, but men don't. That's why they read history.

We have such short memories. Peter M. Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, told me a story about his young son who said that maybe a "forgettery" is better than a memory. Are there things that we would be better off forgetting?

Just the opposite. If I were talking to a CEO, I'd expect him to be able to lecture me on the creation of the Manhattan Project. That was the biggest management project ever. Two billion dollars was spent, and no one knew if it would be successful or not. It combined mathematics, management, and leadership, among other things. If a CEO doesn't know the ins and outs of that project, then how can she hope to accomplish something significant in her own work?

There are similarities between the new economy and the railroad economy. It almost seems as if the new economy really began in the 1860s.

The two economies resemble each other in important ways. Before the locomotive, time hardly mattered. Then speed suddenly entered into the picture. Phrases such as "the train is leaving the station" or "time's a'wastin' " came into vogue. Urgency became the dominant emotion in the country. There was an emphasis on speed over quality. Many people got rich, and many more went bankrupt. Visions of huge fortunes and massive social change shaped people's ambitions. A lot of people went bankrupt, but big fortunes were also made. What especially changed was our belief in ourselves to accomplish great things.