Word: swansons
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...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...
...that happen to Swanson and his collection of folksy phrasings and spot-on aphorisms, which was first published in 2004 and given out free to Raytheon employees before it found a wide and enthusiastic audience that included Warren Buffett and Jack Welch? Credit goes to Carl Durrenberger, a San Diego engineer, who was packing up his cubicle at Hewlett-Packard to move to another division when he came across a copy of a 1944 chestnut given him by a former boss: The Unwritten Laws of Engineering by W.J. King...
...flipped through it, smiling at the dated language. Days later, he read a USA Today article online about Swanson and his rules. A memory flashed. He swiveled his chair to a box he had yet to unpack and fished out the King manual. Looking at the article and the manual side by side, Durrenberger, 29, was "flabbergasted" to note that 16 of Swanson's 33 rules were in fact King's--rusty lingo and all. "Bill Swanson of Raytheon is a plagiarist!" Durrenberger blasted on his blog...
...other end of the scale, Charles J. Swanson ’08, who is “equal parts” white and African American, said he did not want to be the victim of positive discrimination...
...DIED. GERRY THOMAS, 83, inventor of the TV dinner; in Phoenix, Arizona. Thomas came up with the idea as a marketer for poultry company C.A. Swanson & Sons, after seeing that Pan American Airways was developing a flat aluminum tray for hot in-flight meals. Since Swanson had a post-Thanksgiving bird surplus, he devised a multicompartment tray for the turkey and accompanying side dishes. Introduced in 1954, the dinners took off, selling 10 million that year and earning Thomas a raise and a spot on Hollywood's Walk of Fame...