CEO outsources own inspirational anecdotes

Amid all the fuss over that other high-profile plagiarism case comes a story that explains just why American executives earn hundreds of times the pay of the average worker-- it's all about vision. And having a can-do attitude, even when you can't.

Last week's other plagiarist doesn't have this excuse. He is William H. Swanson, the 57-year-old chief executive of Raytheon, the big military contractor, and a board member at Sprint Nextel. Yet his sins have gotten just a smidgeon of the attention that Ms. Viswanathan's have. That is too bad, because in the scheme of things his character matters a lot more than hers does.

The whole situation is enough to make you wonder whether we now have lower expectations for chief executives than we do for teenagers.

FOR years, Mr. Swanson has been peddling a list of common-sense maxims called "Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management," which became something of a cult hit in corporate America. Raytheon published them as a small book and has given away 300,000 copies.

Warren E. Buffett liked it so much, according to Business 2.0 magazine, that he ordered dozens for friends and colleagues.

Mr. Swanson was happy to accept credit, often in an aw-shucks way that fit with his homespun ideas. If you follow the rules, he wrote at the end of the book, "maybe you too can become a leader of a company and maybe it won't take you as long as it took me to get there."

Last month, however, an engineer in San Diego named Carl Durrenberger read the rules and realized they were neither unwritten nor Mr. Swanson's. In 1944, another engineer, W. J. King, published, "The Unwritten Laws of Engineering," which contain 17 of Mr. Swanson's 33 rules, often down to the very word. (. . .)

[Swanson] runs an 80,000-employee company that holds the lives of American soldiers in its hands. His actions affect the reputation of Raytheon's employees and chief executives generally. He is, in short, supposed to be a leader, and to quote a well-known management expert, "When things go wrong, true leaders take responsibility and rectify a mistake with speed and passion."

Actually, Mr. Swanson said that a few months ago. It didn't make the book, but he claims it's one of the rules he lives by. Do you believe him?

Of course not. But I firmly believe that this won't get in the way of a criminally bloated retirement package.