Every year I order a calendar from Despair, Inc. featuring "Demotivators", which are parodies of those motivational placards you see at stores like Successories. I first found out about them when I used to work at a certain software company based in Redmond, WA, and they were quite a hit with my co-workers.

Anyway, we received a solicitation in the mail recently to purchase the 2002 Calendar from Despair. Among the sample tidbits that were mentioned in the solicitation, a Wall Street Journal article was mentioned that indicated that the One-Minute Manager, one of the best-selling business books of all time, was largely plagiarized. I had missed this article, as I don't subscribe (although I intend to look this up soon, just to verify the veracity of the story), but I was certainly disappointed to read that Mr. Blanchard had been accused of plagiarism (rightly or wrongly).

...not that I give a rat's pitootie about Ken Blanchard. Rather, I was disappointed because it is yet another reminder that the road to riches does not seem to involve hard work or even talent, but just knowing which is the good stuff to steal and then packaging it for resale. I've been working hard on my novel, but why bother, if plagiarism is so often rewarded and honest, original effort is so often denied?

Never mind. That's a rhetorical question.

So, the plagiarism thing bothers me. It bothered me at the University of Pennsylvania, where a tenured professor was censured but not in any other way taken to task for plagiarizing from a grad student's thesis. Oh, sure, the professor in question will supposedly not be allowed to hold a Dean position at the University, but that's the extent of his "punishment".

For those of you who don't know, there are only two legitimate grounds for a professor to lose his tenure (outside of being convicted of a felony): 1) falsifying data / forging research, and 2) committing plagiarism. This is the whole point of the tenure system. And yet, this jerk stole a grad student's thesis, delivered it at a conference as his own, and had it subsequently published under his name. And, what happened when it was revealed that this was the caliber of faculty on the rolls at UPenn? They told him that he had been a bad boy, and please don't do it again.

(The fact that the student he plagiarized from was an "Alan Rouselle", or maybe it was "Roussel", from Texas A&M certainly made this case stand out in my mind. When the story hit the Daily Pennsylvanian, I had a number of fellow grad students kid me about my "new line of research." The plagiarized thesis had something to do with the patterns of diarrhea in bovines, or something like that.)

It always bothers me to hear about some well known poobah who rose through the ranks by stealing from others, but I guess it should no longer surprise me. The irony that one of the best-selling business books ever in the history of publishing should have been primarily the product of plagiarism is actually (if true) quite delicious. It speaks volumes about the ethics of business today, and the rewards accorded therein.

Think about it.

Okay, now *stop* thinking about it. That's what I decided to do. I'd considered writing about this juicy morsel, but decided instead to bake some cookies for dessert and maybe write about something else. Baking cookies (using the Nestle Tollhouse pre-fab, pre-cut cookie squares, which means someone else has done all the work and that I could pretend I had something to do with the making of said cookies because I bothered to preheat the oven and stick 'em in) made me think of a song by Limp Bizkit called "Nookie". Why? Because lots of people I know keep referring to it as "I did it all for the Cookie".

I came down to my office with a couple hot, gooey cookies and a glass of milk, and decided to look on the internet to see if anyone had actually posted a recorded parody song of "I did it all for the Nookie". I surfed on over to Google, searched for "I did it all for the Cookie", and there were a ton of hits. I found a couple of decent parody lyrics, a few personal home pages (why people would name their home pages "I Did it All for the Cookie", I don't know) and web logs, plus some computer geek sites that involved all sorts of word play in describing certain computer-related issues. (Linux Bizkit was mentioned in one...) I wasn't able to find any recorded parodies -- at least, not in the first few pages of links -- although I found a fake news article that referred to such a (fictional) parody and parental protests that it generated.

Interestingly, though, I also found a number of sites where different people claimed to have written a set of lyrics parodying the LB song, and they were all the same. (Starting with the lines "I came into this world as a Muppet/Look into these eyes and you will see that they are googly..."). They were all very obviously copied from the same original, but it was hard for me to determine which, if any, legitimately claimed authorship of the parody lyrics.

Too bad, too, because it was a pretty good parody. But, I guess that's the way things go, these days. Who needs original content when you can just copy someone else's?

I suppose I should go now and check to see if there really was a WSJ article about Ken Blanchard and the One Minute Manager being the work of plagiarism....

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PS: A couple of the entries from the first Demotivators calendar were substantially the same as other posters that had been circulating on the Internet at the time, and I've often wondered to what extent this was coincidence and to what extent this, too, was an act of plagiarism. Another thought to ponder as I consider business models....