JPMorgan Chase

The bank that survived every financial crisis for 117 years by treating institutional memory as infrastructure.

JPMorgan Chase maintains a crisis playbook documenting every financial crisis since 1907 - when J.P. Morgan personally prevented a banking collapse by organizing a consortium of bankers to provide liquidity. The playbook contains timelines, causes, company actions, outcomes, and lessons learned from each crisis. It's required reading for incoming executives and updated after each new crisis. This is institutional memory as competitive advantage.

In 2008, that memory saved the bank. While Lehman Brothers collapsed under mortgage exposure and liquidity crisis, JPMorgan had lower mortgage exposure and higher liquidity buffers - defensive positions informed by prior crises. The bank not only survived but acquired Bear Stearns with government guarantees, emerging stronger from the extinction event that killed competitors.

The lesson: organizations without memory are doomed to repeat history. Most companies treat crises as anomalies to forget; JPMorgan treats them as data to systematize. Survival in cyclical environments requires encoding lessons from past cycles into institutional knowledge that outlasts individual executives. The constraint isn't information - it's creating systems that ensure hard-won knowledge transfers across generations of leadership.