YOUR COMPANY HAS HAD A LIFE, TOO

Your company is invested with your life’s blood — your time, your energy, your intelligence and your associations.  As time passes, the narrative of how you managed that company or how your predecessors did is apt to be lost or forgotten.

It just happens. The Bank of America, Wells Fargo and other huge institutions keep archives.  Most companies don’t.

It would be my honor to chronicle the history of your company, whether yours is a family-owned company, a publicly traded entity, or a nonprofit that you direct.

Firms or nonprofits with a long tradition have always intrigued me.  I want to know what the dynamic was that has kept that organization vital, creative and productive over decades. Who were the personalities?  What were the strategies and the challenges ?

One of my proudest achievements has been the history of America’s longest surviving Italian restaurant — the Fior d’Italia in San Francisco.  The restaurant commissioned me to write its history so that the many legends, anecdotes and yarns that were spun since the restaurant’s founding in 1886 would not be lost.

The book, The Fabulous Fior — Over 100 Years in an Italian Kitchen, examines the financial, historical and human forces that shaped North Beach institution. You can visit its web site at www.fabulousfior.com.

I have been a business journalist since the late 1970s.  I have written about hundreds of companies and interviewed innumerable chief executives, executive directors and other corporate officers.

It has been my privilege to interview executives when their companies were flush and when they were struggling. Domestic and overseas as well. I have investigated and written about startups, longtime institutions, the street corner mom-and-pop and, inevitably, failures.  Many nonprofits have also been the subject of my research.