Expanding the Narrative of Business Continuity History

Purpose in Work and the Value of Collective History

“Sometimes it’s a bit of vocation, a calling, you know?” The off-hand remark of a 30-year business continuity veteran struck me as odd in my early career. In context, the comment was an assessment of the societal or systemic value of resilience work at the end of a difficult day; an acknowledgement of its thankless toils. But it landed like a personal justification, an attempt to reconcile the job’s unique, unseen difficulties with a nurtured, if not beleaguered, sense of purpose and duty that had brought this person to the profession in the first place.

In my experience, resilience professionals feel this tension deeply. We are people who find meaning in helping calm the storm, who take interest in understanding and protecting the systems, structures, and organizations of modern society. But we provide a protective service, not a revenue-generating or mission-advancing product. If our work succeeds, few are aware, except perhaps those who become the face of a well-managed crisis. If it fails, we know the consequences for our organizations, their people, and the economy.

My colleague had a point, that one way to relieve the tension is to lean into the idea of “vocation,” even if business resilience is not as easily or widely understood as other emergency disciplines. Its relatively smaller size notwithstanding, resilience work has all the trappings of an established profession — standard practices, global applicability, measurable impact, formidable institutions — and viewing it as such is helpful for understanding our place in the modern workforce. One aspect of resilience as an established profession, however, is underdeveloped: the historical narrative. I propose understanding and building out the historical record of our profession would provide an answer to the tired veteran practitioner: their work is part of a bigger story.

To my knowledge at time of writing, our profession does not have a clear written record of its history. I sense the “origin story” of modern resilience work is primarily known anecdotally and as tribal knowledge. Systematic historical work is sparse and, to be sure, I’m not the first to point this out. For example, Andrew Hiles documented pieces of the evolution of BCM across sectors in “The Definitive Handbook of Business Continuity Management.” It is not hard to find one-off articles (like the present one) that offer decade-by-decade summary perspectives and short histories of the profession. Some hearken back to previous eras to better understand present challenges. Some organizations, notably the BCI, have documented the story of their own organizational evolution. Additionally, the academic world has made a handful of noteworthy contributions, such as Herbane’s 2010 historical review of BCM practices as well as various literature reviews (such as Pieraccini 2025) that contextualize evolutions in modern practice in the relevant theory and sometimes history.

Many of these narratives follow essentially the same familiar pattern, usually starting in the 1960s then following the evolution of computing as a guiding principle. We find references to continuity considerations for mainframe computing in the 1960-70s and to the development of IT disaster recovery work across the 1980s and 1990s, evolving and proliferating alongside the computer itself. Many of us are aware of how security perspectives took the limelight after 9/11 and, if asked, would probably be able to pinpoint the 2010s as the time where business continuity evolved most rapidly toward an organizational resilience approach. COVID-19 brought renewed energy to the idea of business resilience at scale. At the same time, operational resilience is blossoming as an evolution of business continuity. Today we’re seeing firsthand the need to build resilience across supply chains and align to cybersecurity protections, and the mandate to build technology resilience is stronger than ever as organizations grapple with ransomware and artificial intelligence. These are all pieces of a broader puzzle, as of yet unfinished.

In my view, that puzzle is the story of a profession dedicated to the ongoing development and implementation of practices to protect the lifeline sectors and economic foundations of modern life. Telling the story of our profession, at least in part, gives weight to the fact this effort is not new and that modern practice may be contextualized in broader historical patterns of how people protected their organizations. It points to a torch passed from one generation to the next, from my colleague to me. It answers the tension many feel by giving visibility to a profession whose success stories are defined by preparedness rather than heroics. It provides a sense of historical grounding that can underpin a collective sense of self as other professions may enjoy.

This article tells the story of how I came to this proposition, and what piece of BC history I can contribute to the puzzle.

A Personal Journey into the History of Business Resilience

My foray into BC history began as a personal endeavor. The thought had never occurred to me until one afternoon about a year ago, at the end of a long day working with people who were, frankly, rude and resistant. I leaned back in my chair in my home office, breathed deeply, and looked down. Seated at my great grandfather’s solid steel heirloom desk, I saw a familiar brass tag in a way I had not before. Having worked at this desk for more than a decade, I had never really stopped to consider the subtext engraved into the brass: “General Fireproofing Company.”

That day, after years of impact analysis and crisis planning, those words struck as they had never before. I set out on what became a months-long journey to find more information about my desk. Why would a company make fireproof desks? Why was fireproofing the primary selling point? Why did my great grandfather own one?

Information proved unexpectedly difficult to find, and certainly data on the General Fireproofing Company (GFC) is sparse. Antique blogs, trade archives, and various eBay listings were the majority of the information I found. It appears the company operated from 1902-1989, but found its niche in stylish-but-fireproof office furniture after the Banker’s Panic of 1907 forced them out of construction. They released their first fireproof safe in 1912 and were established as market leaders by the mid-1920s in connection with their assembly-line-ready steel desks. My desk is an uncommon single-pedestal model with a liftwell typewriter from this early product line, built around 1930.

In my research, it became clear fire disasters took a major toll on American life in the first decades of the twentieth century. According to one study, the most devastating of all 73 major fires recorded in the twentieth century were in the period 1900-1950. Some still hold records today, such as the San Francisco Earthquake Fire of 1906, which razed 492 city blocks and claimed more than 3,000 lives. The loss of life and property from fires across the nation was so significant insured losses outpaced fire insurance industry profit for years. It was into this context, with these fire disasters seared into the public memory, GFC made their proposition. They saw that businesses needed better ways to protect themselves, and new manufacturing capabilities in the industrial age were making that possible.

At this point, I was hooked. It all seemed unexpectedly familiar, as though I was researching for a scenario exercise for a different time period. I wanted to know more about this nearly-forgotten company and why my ancestor had purchased one of their desks. As I soon discovered, the sense of familiarity was real, because GFC’s value proposition was akin to the work I do today. Then it hit me: maybe business resilience is not as new as I thought.

Resurrecting a Voice for Business Resilience from 1924

Late last year, I picked up a hard-copy, 1924 GFC trade catalogue that brought this theory to life. Entitled “Safeguarding the Vital Records of Business,” the catalogue summarizes the need to proactively protect businesses against the risk of fire by protecting a core asset dependency: paper records. The first page lays this out with an essay which could easily be mistaken for a case for the value of contemporary business continuity practice:

“The great advances of civilization have been achieved only through the ability of each succeeding generation to benefit by the mistakes and successes of the past. Our textbooks, our histories and, in fact, all principles that are the basis of our modern existence have been developed because it has been possible to refer to the carefully preserved records of past achievements. Where would be the marvelous inventions of today if our present-day inventors had not been able to begin where their predecessors had left off? …

“Unfortunately, business men [sic] are not always impressed with the extreme value of their records and the importance of those records to the smooth operation of their business. The making of records, their filing and the constant reference to them are but incidents in the ordinary day’s business. But when one stops to consider that approximately 84% of all goods manufactured in this country are purchased directly or indirectly by means of correspondence and that records of such transactions must be retained for business reasons, one realizes how difficult a matter it would be to re-establish a business, should its records be destroyed by fire.

“Let us be specific. Take the case of your own business for instance. If you were deprived of your records tonight, how would you conduct tomorrow’s affairs? Could you draw upon your memory to supply all the information necessary to conduct satisfactory transactions with even one of your customers or clients, as the case may be? When careful thought is given to the subject, it is brought forcibly to one’s attention that the records of a business are the very breath of its existence. However, as in life itself, their true value is rarely fully appreciated until their loss brings the subject close to home.

“You realize the value of your life to your family; and through your forethought provide for your dependents in adequately insuring your value to them.

“What you are to your family, your records are to the normal functioning of your business. Abolish those records and your business immediately paralyzed, and the disturbing fact is brought forcibly home that there is no such thing as adequate insurance for records – the life-impelling factor of organized business. True, your offices may be housed in one of the so-called ‘fireproof’ buildings but past performances of these buildings in conflagrations have shown that they are not entirely immune to fire, in many cases the whole of their contents being destroyed.

“It is impossible to over-emphasize this hazard that is constantly threatening your business, but fortunately there is a method of protection that is available.”

GFC writers did not stop there. They continue describing the necessity of hardcopy records to prove losses for insurance claims, and they point out that normal policies of the day did not cover the loss of critical documentation. This would be a tough reality to face if those records had been burned in a new build, which had been marketed as fireproof. That was the situation faced by the CB & Q Railroad Company, whose records burned in the “fireproof” Burlington Building in Chicago in 1922, which impacted 13 other commercial buildings nearby.

Business leaders reading this catalogue would have resonated with that message and understood the impact fire could bring, even on businesses that survived a major fire. For example, the 1906 San Francisco fire cost Wells Fargo vast archives of account ledgers, deposit books, and customer records as well as 50 bank locations. GFC’s furniture was the alternative solution to meet the needs of business leaders who witnessed such devastation and were losing confidence in their buildings to protect against fire.

Of course, this catalogue is marketing material, distributed widely enough to now be included in trade archives. There is nonetheless a strong case that surviving businesses recovered from these disasters at least in part because of GFC products, especially record-dependent businesses. That claim is backed by decades of success. GFC’s 1600 line of office equipment boomed after its 1925 release, and sales even doubled after a pause in furniture manufacturing during World War II. This momentum carried into the 1950s and 1960s when their Fireproofer line took off across sectors in the U.S. and by some measures became some of the best selling commercial office desks in the world. They succeeded because their products worked for businesses of all kinds, even the Bourke-Rice Envelope Company, whose records were preserved by a GFC safe and enabled business recovery following the 1922 Burlington Building fire.

GFC’s success story is anchored on an effective continuity solution sold to organizations dependent on paper records. To purchase a GFC product was a risk-informed investment toward ensuring continuity of operations; a value proposition closely aligned to that of contemporary BCM programs. While “BCM” was not yet a coined phrase, my great grandfather bought in.

My Great Grandfather and the Giant, Steel Desk

To learn why, I picked up my great grandfather’s autobiography. He was a small business owner selling insurance in rural North Carolina. He understood the impact of fire, having lost his own identity records to the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904 — a fire that eliminated an entire business district of the city. Having worked in the railroad industry for many years, he had likely heard of the 1922 Burlington Building fire and the severe impact on the CB & Q Railroad Company. He was a volunteer firefighter and survived two near-death accidents (he was no stranger to risk) in his early life. Eventually, he settled on insurance to support his young family just before the Great Depression. The warning expressed in the GFC catalogue would have resonated strongly with him: “there is no such thing as adequate insurance for records.”

For an insurance salesman in the 1930s, hardcopy records were central to his business’ viability because they substantiated his ability to earn premiums and payout claims fairly. This made his records a dependency not only for his business but for his family to survive the national economic crisis. He was aware of the way his clients put trust in the reliability of his services to ensure adequate coverage — a reality akin to modern policyholder protections. Indeed, for him the need to be prepared to protect his business was a matter of ethics. In his autobiography, he names business reliability as a deeply personal concern that extended beyond equipment purchases:

“Insurance is always a highly personal business, so in order to succeed, professional trustworthiness and personal trustworthiness must go hand in hand. Because insurance is an intangible product, the only thing clients have on which to base a decision to purchase the product is the reliability of the company … plus the personal character and integrity of the salesman. … I think that all my clients recognized my sincerity, and this helped guarantee that my business would not fail and that I could build a secure future for my family.”

Four generations and nearly a century later, I sit at his steel desk in my home office working on business resilience for a major financial company. Insofar as he and I both have sought to improve the reliability of financial service outcomes at this desk, we have shared a common purpose. The threats have changed, but the need to preserve vital records has not. Rather than a building fire, we protect against ransomware. Rather than buying steel desks, we build better cloud infrastructure. Our data management systems are digital, complex, and significantly less personal in nature than his. Our work carries forth from the same business and ethical imperative: to protect the foundational elements of critical services to ensure continuity of critical services.

Expanding the Historical Narrative for Business Resilience

What does this historical perspective mean for that 30-year-veteran resilience manager grappling with the tension of purpose and futility in their work? It means there is a significant history to the profession, a multigenerational and cross-cultural effort to protect critical societal functions.

The history of preparedness is not just firefighting or fireproofing; there is a bigger story here, and modern business resilience has a place. The preparedness imperative has been recognized by businesses for generations, even if the term “business continuity” is new. The work we do is at least a century old, dating to advances in manufacturing technology after the industrial revolution brought fresh solutions to old problems like fire.

The story of my desk, its creators, and its original owner should remind the tired resilience practitioner they are not alone in their efforts. Even if their impact assessments are ignored, or they stand as a team of one among thousands, the need for preparedness was championed by others across generations and remains today a worthwhile cause. Preparedness looked different in the past, but the purpose was the same. There is strength and energy to be found in knowing our vocation in work is shared by many who came before.

To be sure, this story does not complete the puzzle. There is more work to be done tracing the history of the resilience profession. This article explored how new technology enabled better business protections against fire in the early twentieth century — but the need to respond and recover from operational disruptions was not new then, either. For as long as records have underpinned services and trade agreements, businesses would have needed to protect them. The story written here is one small piece of the puzzle, but it points to an expanded narrative around business continuity and the various “protective disciplines” of today. This story is particularly close to my heart because it provides an answer many seek, and I have the opportunity to sit with it each day as I log in to work.