JANE CHIN, PH.D. ∞

Last year after reading a business magazine article about Raytheon CEO William Swanson’s “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management”, I requested and got a copy of the little booklet.

I thought the booklet was well done, most of the advice are common sense, but it’s always interesting to get a CEO’s perspective.

Unfortunately, sections of the book were not from a CEO’s perspective. Swanson had plagiarized from a 1944 management book called “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering,” by UCLA professor, W.J. King.

According to today’s Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Raytheon is penalizing Swanson ~$1 million for this plagiarism [Click if you have a subscription], by way of incentive-stock compensation and not giving Swanson a salary raise.

WSJ said this was a “rare public rebuke.”

Maybe unethical and questionable activities seem to be the norm in our society today because of “rare public rebukes.”

Furthermore Raytheon’s board stated that “it believes the ethical misstep wasn’t deliberate” and refuses to refer to the incidence with the word “plagiarism.” Swanson also apologized for not properly checking sources that included the aforementioned book and other published material used for his 2001 speech-turned-book.

Those of us who have ever written a term paper in school know very well that when we plagiarized material, it’s deliberate and we knew exactly what it was that we were doing. I don’t believe for a minute that this was not intentional or deliberate.

Plagiarism involves:

1. accessing an already existing body of work
2. choosing parts of the work that you like
3. copying-and-pasting or transcribing whole parts onto a piece you will claim as your own
4. claiming the piece as your own to serve your own interests
5. and consciously choosing not to disclose the original source

Committing plagiarism requires at least 5 discrete acts of consciousness, and at every action point, a person has all the opportunities in the world to decide to do the right thing, but fails to do so.

Perhaps plagiarists believe they won’t ever be found out. Now that we have the likes of Internet search engines, it is easier than ever to plagiarize, and it is just as easy to be found out.