London-based Arnold Kransdorff was educated in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, and South Africa. He was trained as a journalist in the 1960s by the campaigning East London Daily Dispatch editor Donald Woods (of the movie, “Cry Freedom”, fame), after which he moved to Salisbury, now Harare, to become a parliamentary reporter for the Inter-African News Agency (IANA) during the initial period of Ian Smith's UDI. Political differences with the Rhodesian Government led him to emigrate to the UK in 1968 to pursue his broader career objectives in Europe.

In London he worked for a trade newspaper and financial news agency in Fleet Street before joining the Financial Times for 10 years, first as a sub-editor and then as a financial commentator on the Stock Exchange and a writer for the newspaper’s Management Page, where he was awarded the prize of “Industrial Feature of the Year” in 1981.

In 1984 he founded London-based Pencorp group, a knowledge management consultancy and publishing company helping organisations cope with the stop-start consequences of the flexible labour market. With a wide historical knowledge of industry and a deep understanding of the strategic and tactical issues facing international business, he is an enthusiastic proponent of the principles of the Learning Organisation, in particular experiential learning, post-project auditing, benchmarking and using corporate and business history as a management development tool. He trail-blazed the technique of Oral Debriefing and the use of explicit corporate history as experiential learning tools.

He is the innovator of the concepts known as corporate amnesia and Experience-Based Management (EBM).

Arnold has written three books on the wider subject of corporate amnesia and experiential learning.

Corporate Amnesia: Keeping Know-how in the Company identifies the problem of institutional-specific knowledge loss in the wake of the flexible labour market. Link to purchase.

Corporate DNA: Using Organizational Memory to Improve Poor Decision-Making is a book that explains how organisations can capture and apply their ‘walkabout' knowledge to improve productivity and competitiveness. It enables employers to take advantage of the flexible labour market without losing the ability to learn from their own experiences. Link to purchase.

Knowledge Management: Begging for a Bigger Role is a shorter version in a eBook format that puts the subject into the contemporary context of the credit crunch and recession. Specifically it addresses the limitations of conventional approaches to experiential learning and gives Knowledge Management a new and expanded role in the management discipline of decision making.

This book (available tp purchase from Business Expert Press) is offered alongside an explanatory article about the importance of experiential learning entitled The Experiential Non-Learning Reason Behind the Credit Crunch & Other Trillion Dollar Failures. It explains how experiential non -learning contributed to the credit crunch and subsequent recession – as well as another, less visible, trillion dollar failure – and the reason why countries are struggling with the solution. Link to purchase.

He is also widely published in academic and trade journals, and national newspapers, his writings earning him an Award of Excellence in 1997 from Anbar Management Intelligence, the world's leading guide in management journal literature.

Other credentials:

• A Visiting Fellow at Nottingham University Business School Institute of International Business History (UNIBHI).
• Co-supervised a US doctoral thesis on Organisational Memory.
• A guest lecturer at many UK and overseas business schools; also a regular speaker at international conferences.
• A book reviewer for the US journal Enterprise and Society.
• A member of the UK’s Association of Business Historians, the European Business History Association and the Business History Conference of the US.
• Assisted in the RSA's Inquiry on ‘Tomorrow's Company’, the ESRC-commissioned study on ‘Management Research’, the CBI's deliberations on ‘Flexible Labour Markets’ and the Washington, DC-based Corporate Leadership Council on its research into ‘New Tools for Managing Workforce Stability and Engagement’.

In his spare time he enjoys boating on the inland waterways. He is also an urban beekeeper and a keen family geneologist (reference http://www.goldfinch.demon.co.uk/familytree/).