Interview with Laurence Mussio, Director of the Long Run Initiative

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Finding ways to bring Business History to wider audiences has become a recurring theme of recent years. As the Call for Papers section shows, there is a growing appetite for a ‘historical turn’ in research agendas due to the extensive efforts of Business Historians in promoting the importance of historical methods and temporal analysis in the various Management Disciplines. Interest is also developing in promoting the benefits of historical analysis to current business leaders and policy makers, with projects seeking to show how deeper understanding of firms, markets and institutions can provide vital context and improve decision-making. Launched in 2018, the Long Run Initiative (LRI) has set out to make this case and build channels to link the Business History community with these groups. I was delighted to speak with one of the LRI’s directors, Dr Laurence B. Mussio, to discuss some of the opportunities and challenges he has experienced in launching the initiative and what lies ahead.

3 Laurence, what motivated the establishment of the LRI? The concept of the LRI developed from two main impulses. The first impulse came from my personal ‘long-run experience’ as a scholar bridging two distinct worlds – the world of the academy and the corporate and public policy worlds. From this vantage point, each of those two worlds operated with very little reference to each other. As I worked with senior corporate executives and public policymakers, I saw that there was a serious opportunity to connect the two, beyond the usual uses of history as marking anniversaries or milestones. Unlocking that opportunity is far from straightforward, however. It is about convincing knowledgeable sceptics in business and government on the strategic and managerial relevance of the kind of work that we do.

My own experience led me to believe that senior executives were open to persuasion to put a more sophisticated understanding of long-run context into the ‘decision engines’ of their firms. The second impulse for the LRI came on the margins of various academic conferences, and specifically in discussions with colleagues who, in their own experience and work, had come to similar conclusions about how our work, analysis and insight could be connected to a broader context and relevance. These were typically colleagues who wanted to create deeper or more meaningful connections outside the academic world, and who felt we as a profession had something important to contribute too many current debates, but are generally really poor at getting ourselves a seat at the table.

Through discussions with John Turner and Michael Aldous at Queen’s University Belfast (QUB), we decided to try to create the table ourselves, and develop a space that brings together corporate leaders and policy makers with business and economic historians to discuss the grand challenges facing society.