Knowledge is NOT Power

Let's be serious.  Apparently not only is knowledge not power, it isn't even of much value to most companies.  Otherwise employees wouldn't be quitting, retiring, or laid off with headfulls of it, without their employers making some sort of effort to capture it for ongoing use in the enterprise.

From what I've heard and witnessed, it's not unual for employees to be kept working in their production roles, right up to the time for their departure, with little to no time allocated for knowledge transfer.  Then, depending on the circumstances of their leaving, they're given either cake and a card, or a box to carry out their crap in.

If knowledge was truly considered to be of value to companies there would be formal processes in place to ensure that institutional knowledge was captured and documented.  Instead, knowledge transfer is more like a session in which the exiting party is expected to convey everything they've learned over the years in one or two hours with their successor, kind of like regurgitation-feeding of baby birds.

While writing this piece I started to wonder where the aphorism "Knowledge is Power" came from.  Imagine my surprise in finding that the phrase was coined over 400 years ago, in 1597, by Sir Francis Bacon.  I mean, 400 YEARS?  How much knowledge could there have been at the turn of the 16th century anyway?  Although he was a respected scientist and philosopher, he died bankrupt.

Now I'm worried that knowledge may not be money either.