Raytheon CEO William Swanson’s compensation will be about $1m lower this year because he lifted parts of his book, “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management,” from other sources. According to the New York Times:

… many of Mr. Swanson’s insights were later found to have been taken from a 1944 engineering classic, “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering,” by W. J. King, an engineering professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. Of Mr. Swanson’s 33 rules, a total of 17 were contained in the King book, often word for word. In addition, The Boston Herald reported today that Mr. Swanson had also lifted the first four of his rules from a 2001 Wall Street Journal article written by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld that was called “Rumsfeld Rules.” For instance, the first rule in both Mr. Swanson’s book and Mr. Rumsfeld’s article is the same — “Learn to say ‘I don’t know.’ If used when appropriate, it will be used often.” The Herald also found that Mr. Swanson’s rule No. 32 is similar to a life lesson about rude treatment of waiters that was contained in the book “Dave Barry Turns 50,” written by Mr. Barry, a syndicated humor columnist.

CEOs, Harvard students … but not us! Here at Independent Sources, what we write is original — because no one else would bother!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 3rd, 2006 at 3:55 pm by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under Funny ... to us. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.