Dziedzictwo przeszłości (stare myślenie) a determinanty budowy nowoczesnej firmy

Purpose – The paper deals with the subject of the legacy of the past understood as a category of “the old way of thinking” and its impact on the contemporary situation and future standing of the company. Description – It was pointed out that on the doorstep of ownership transformation in Poland, in 1989, managers of the state-owned enterprises usually distanced themselves from the legacy of the past of the companies they managed. They used a “thick line” policy. In their managerial activitie, they could not refer to their own experiences and prove they were “witnesses of mistakes”. As a result of the above, the process of ownership transformation and, the following modernization of enterprises, including their organizational structure, method of management and work organization, were in many cases delayed, and in many cases ended in the declaration of bankruptcy. Only some enterprises which firmly broke up with the legacy of the past and after ownership transformation joined the global market, managed to succeed. In a private sector that formed after 1989, entrepreneurs, due to the lack of tradition of carrying out business, could only count on their own intuition and act basing on the trial-and-error method. At the end of 1990s a younger generation of entrepreneurs gained a possibility to analyze mistakes committed by people who had started their economic activity just after 1989. Such was the way of formation of a generation of entrepreneurs, so-called: “witnesses of mistakes”.