Continuity sustained past the point anyone remembers why becomes an asset nothing else can manufacture.

principle — attributed to Jaclyn Bernstein

Twenty-five years after the first reading of the names, most of the people running the ceremony today are museum employees, not outside volunteers who remember what the readers' tent looked like before there was a museum. Bernstein is one of the few who isn't. Her own account of her standing there is unadorned: Empire Force has simply never not been there. The value of that fact has nothing to do with any particular skill she brings this year. It is the accumulated weight of never once being absent, a form of credibility that cannot be hired, purchased, or shortcut, only earned one unbroken year at a time.

For understanding why an organization values someone whose main qualification is that they never left.

continuity, institutional-memory, credibility, long-term-commitment