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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

I should have known better.

Last week I griped about Gartner failing to give credit where due, based on the simple arithmetic of an August, 2007 Gartner press release, which said, “[Research Fellow] Jackie Fenn has been authoring the hype cycle for emerging technologies for 12 years.”

For those few of you who had trouble with the arithmetic, you have to subtract eleven years, not twelve, to arrive at year #1 (12-11=1; subtracting 12 brings you to year 0) which meant the first publication would have been in 1996, several months after I published a very similar Technology Life Cycle in InfoWorld.

It appears Gartner is among those who have trouble with arithmetic. Subscriber Jim Parker pointed me to a January, 1995 Gartner report authored by Jackie Fenn which presented their Hype Cycle in all its glory. That means she has been publishing this for thirteen years, not twelve.

It also means she beat me to the punch.

Does this mean I plagiarized her? No. I had been using my version in conversation for several years before publishing it. Like Darwin and Wallace, Newton and Leibnitz before them, and countless other examples, Fenn and I arrived at the same idea independently.

As I say, I should have known better, on two counts. The first is one mentioned in this space more than once: Beware of ideas that fit your biases.

Most of us accept without scrutiny anything that fits what we already think. We only dig deeply into evidence and logic that run counter to what our gut tells us.

We have it backward.

It isn’t much of a secret that I frequently find Gartner annoying. So I took the Gartner press release at face value, where just a bit of digging would have saved me quite a bit of embarrassment.

That’s the first count. The second count is something I’ve learned over the years but often fail to remember: When you’re at all uncertain … and even when you aren’t … you’re more likely to be right by giving someone the benefit of the doubt than by withholding it.

This episode raised a third issue as well. A friend, commenting on the column, pointed out the futility of trying to protect any intellectual property placed on the Web.

He is, of course, right. Much as I would like to get credit for coining the term “ManagementSpeak,” for example, I’m well aware that when people enjoy content they will share it with friends and family. When they do so they don’t always take care to include authorship information when they cut and paste the content into an e-mail for wide distribution.

So while my desire for continuing ego inflation makes me mildly sad whenever someone forwards a list of unattributed ManagementSpeaks to me with the comment, “I thought you’d enjoy these,” it doesn’t really bother me. Quite the opposite — at least I’ve had an impact.

There is a difference, however, between failing to attribute and dishonestly claiming authorship. Failure to attribute authorship is, as sins go, pretty minor; nothing more than slovenly scholarship. Dishonestly claiming authorship is, on the other hand, plagiarism — something else entirely.

It’s a distinction worth preserving. So when, on the IT Catalysts website, we provide a description of our “IT Effectiveness Framework,” it’s with full recognition that competitors can learn the framework, modify it to their tastes, enhance it if they have the ingenuity, and use it to their profit if they choose to.

If they modify it enough they can put their own name on it. If they use it unchanged and claim it as their own, they are guilty of plagiarism and probably in violation of copyright law besides.

From our perspective the marketing value of putting the information where prospective clients can read it outweighs the risks associated with making it available to our competitors.

On our website we don’t provide the entire “IT Organizational Performance Model” — a more complex and complete account of the factors needed to run an effective IT organization. We don’t because we have invested considerable effort in this model, and consider it both proprietary and a competitive advantage.

There’s one more topic to cover in the subject of intellectual property: Priority. Scientists consider priority — the question of who first published a discovery — to be significant, and acknowledgement of priority to be ethically important.

It’s a principle I agree with. And so, although we created very similar models in parallel, Gartner deserves credit for priority in establishing the “Hype Cycle.”

Even if it is annoying.

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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

One of the dumbest bits of political commentary in the past several years came from Jonah Goldberg. Commenting on somebody-or-other’s accusation that somebody else … somebody else Goldberg happens to like … was a hypocrite, Goldberg said, approvingly, that in order to be a hypocrite you first have to have principles.

Readers of Keep the Joint Running, being more sophisticated than readers of Jonah Goldberg, recognize the difference between having principles and espousing them. Some, concerned that I might be on the wrong side of this distinction, asked how I could have spent more than a month touting the advantages of de-regulating the PC, and then written a column that used fairly harsh language to describe governmental deregulation and its consequences.

The reason starts with the Economist‘s delicious phrase, “An analogy isn’t the same thing as being the same thing.” Here, the offending analogy is that a business is like a marketplace.

Some business leaders do run their companies as marketplaces (instituting, for example, charge-backs instead of effective governance). I’m sure this must be a good idea in some situations. I don’t know what they are, but in an infinite universe everything allowed by physical law must occur somewhere.

Mostly, marketplaces and businesses have only this in common: Absolutely nothing.

Businesses … well-run businesses, at least … have a purpose. Three purposes, really.

They are (1) organized to achieve their mission (which rarely has much in common with their mission statement, but that’s a different topic. They are (2) concerned with survival and self-perpetuation, although less so than you might think: Boards of directors have no compunction about selling the companies they govern should that seem more lucrative for shareholders than continuing to operate independently.

And, (3) the best companies regularly reevaluate their mission (and strategy, and vision, and “theory of the business” to use Peter Drucker’s term) making adjustments to ensure continuing relevance within the marketplace in which they operate.

Well-run companies coach, redirect, or terminate those individuals, supervisors, managers and executives who set their own direction, ignoring the company’s purposes.

All of this is the opposite of a marketplace. Marketplaces are inanimate spaces where businesses with independent purposes and direction interact. If the Cubs were a professional baseball team (we can only wish), Wrigley Field would be its marketplace — the space where it interacts with its competitors.

In baseball the need to regulate the marketplace is clear. Baseball needs rules, and has them. For example, the third baseman isn’t allowed to clothesline a runner to prevent him from scoring.

The rules need enforcement or they would be meaningless, hence the presence of umpires. Very important: The enforcers don’t consider the enforced to be their customers. Were they to consider anyone to be their customer their role would be at risk. (No one team is their customer, for obvious reasons; the fans likewise. Neither is Major League Baseball. If it were, and if those running MLB were to decide they would make more money if the season were scripted, pro wrestling style, then umpires would be paid to rig outcomes.)

Umpires, to be effective, must be loyal only to the principle of fair enforcement of the rules.

In professional sports we expect playing fields to be fair, level and impartial. If one of the officiators violates that expectation, he or she quickly becomes an ex-officiator.

Americans expect business marketplaces to be fair, level and impartial as well. We expect rules to be written so as to favor no one competitor over the rest. We expect enforcement of the rules to be fair and equitable as well.

Well, no, actually we don’t. Not anymore. Now we expect businesses to back up their ability to lobby for rules favorable to themselves with large campaign contributions. We worry about regulators viewing those they regulate as their customers. And, we are told on a regular basis that regulation never works anyway, due to the cleverness of the regulated.

It’s nonsense. Were that the case, top executives would consider insider trading laws to be a joke, the power industry would pollute with impunity, and we’d have experienced one Enron each year since Sarbanes-Oxley took effect.

We haven’t.

The impact on you: You’re regulating a business, not a marketplace. That implies alignment to a common purpose, which leads to a different level of trust, which in turn should result in much less regulation than what’s needed in a marketplace.

If this description doesn’t fit your company, there’s something seriously wrong with your company.

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