Rule No. 1: Don't Copy

The CEO of Raytheon became a management guru with his book of maxims. How he missed a key one

At first, William Swanson tried to shrug off the discovery that 16 of the rules in his handy and much acclaimed booklet Swanson's Unwritten Rules of Management had been ripped off from an obscure engineering work published more than 60 years ago. Then, when it turned out that other rules had been lifted from the precepts of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and humorist Dave Barry, the episode became a full-blown public relations disaster for the CEO of Raytheon, a defense contractor based in Waltham, Mass., that has 80,000 employees and more than $22 billion in annual sales. By last week a...

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