There seems to be some sort of attribution problem in the culture today. A Harvard student just had her first book yanked by her embarassed publisher. And Raytheon CEO William Swanson just stopped distributing his popular booklet Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management, after accusations of word for word lifting from an earlier text..
The booklet has attained cult-like status among business leaders, with more than 300,000 free copies shipped over the years by Raytheon.
According to USA TODAY, about half of Swanson’s rules can be found word for word or nearly so in the 1944 book The Unwritten Laws of Engineering, by W.J. (William Julian) King, a one-time General Electric engineer who retired as a UCLA engineering professor in 1969.
Speaking of attribution, check out how this person credits us for what we do here.
Attribute. It’s Not Hard.
May 3, 2006 By
About David BurnI wrote my first ad for a political candidate when I was 17 years old. She won her race and I felt the seductive power of advertising for the first time. Today—after working for seven agencies in five states—I am head of brand strategy and creative at Bonehook in Portland, Oregon.
