How a few good recordings can keep good information from going to waste.

When I was a sophomore in college, I took a “chemistry for dummies” course that was part of fulfilling the natural sciences requirement of my liberal arts degree. I hated every second of it. In addition to my not having much aptitude for science, the professor was dull and of a generally disagreeable temperament, and the book was awful. I mean, truly the pits. Boring. Practically devoid of color, photos, or other helpful visual info. No mention of any practical application of what we were supposedly learning. It cost me over $100, and this was 20 years ago. I couldn’t wait to sell it back to the store at the end of the term.

I got an unpleasant surprise, though. The publisher was putting out a new edition. They wouldn’t take the stupid thing back.

In a fit of what I thought at the time was righteous indignation, I grabbed the book, the trash can from my dorm room, and my trusty Zippo lighter, and set about torching the thing out in the middle of the quad. And I, with fist held aloft in a universally understood stick-it-to-the-man pose, actually felt pretty good while I was doing it.

Fast forward a couple of years. I was in Berlin, Germany on a yearlong student exchange. I was sitting on a train with a few friends from the program and a couple of new acquaintances, one of whom was a PhD student in chemistry. The conversation came around to my flailing attempts to learn the subject, and I proudly brought up my moment of blazing rebellion with the outdated devil tome of brain-wrenching chemical formulas.

A word to the wise: If you ever find yourself in Germany, never, ever brag to anyone about having burned a book.

My friends and acquaintances set upon me from all sides, administering a thorough (and well-deserved) tongue-lashing. Over the next unpleasant hour, I came to learn something that I should have already known at age 21. That no matter what your relationship with the material, no matter how offensive or boring or useless you find the content, destroying information is just plain wrong. Maybe someone else will have use for it. Maybe you’re not ready for its lessons, but someday you will be. In truth, you never know when it might come in handy. Especially now that information can be so economically stored, there’s no reason for wanton waste.

Thankfully, the days of book bonfires are largely a thing of the past. Nowadays, information loss is more a matter of neglect and unhappy accident than it is of intentional destruction.

Most of us are poor stewards of our information. If you ask the majority of so-called information professionals, they’ll probably admit to having no consistent backup plan for their computer data. Unless, of course, they’ve already experienced a loss, and learned first-hand just how devastating it can be when a drive starts emitting the clickety-click-click sound of physical hardware failure. The major data recovery services often have special crisis counselors on standby, precisely because the failure of a critical drive can be so personally and professionally catastrophic.

Knowledge loss doesn’t have to be quite so sudden or spectacular as a smoking hard drive, of course. Very often, in a professional environment, the loss occurs due to changes in personnel. People leave. People get promoted or transferred. Unfortunately, some people unexpectedly die. They often take their knowledge with them.

Does your office manager have so much information in her head about the inner workings of your business that she’s essentially regarded as irreplaceable? If so, you’re courting trouble. Storage is cheap and plentiful, as is bandwidth. There’s no excuse for not documenting your processes.

Do you have a system for preserving the collective information of your enterprise? How big is your knowledge bank? If you lost a key person or a database, would you still be okay? Sound off in the comments…