We kept watching good organizations start over.

Every fall, the same cold start.

At Simon, we watched it up close. A capable board spends a year building real things — sponsor relationships, an events playbook, a budget that finally works — then hands all of it off in a shared drive and a single coffee chat. Whatever doesn’t fit in that hour leaves with them.

So the next team starts from memory and guesswork. Sponsor contacts go cold because no one knew they existed. The same mistakes get repeated — not from carelessness, but because the lesson left with the person who learned it. An organization can be years old and still wake up every fall with no record of itself.

None of that is a people problem. It’s a memory problem. Institutional knowledge shouldn’t depend on whether one person remembered to write it down on the way out — it should accumulate on its own, as the work happens, and stay with the seat.

The role should keep what it knows, even after the people who built it have graduated.