Executive privilege
There's something to be said for the title of
In a mere five words, he fit in two big lies. I'm not sure we should be buying many more missiles from this guy.
Lie one: They aren't Swanson's rules of business, at least not half of them, which he cribbed from a late California engineering professor, W. J. King. It's anyone's guess where the others originated.
Lie two: They weren't unwritten. The aforementioned King published his thoughts in a 1944 book called ''The Unwritten Laws of Engineering." Even the two titles are nearly the same.
Let's be clear, if he had called his booklet, ''The Unwritten Rules of Business, Compiled by Bill Swanson," he would have been fine. If he had directly credited King in his foreword, he'd be fine.
He didn't, which leads to the inevitable, indisputable conclusion that Swanson wanted every reader to believe that every gem was the result of his own genius.
But rather than public outrage or a full-on apology from the great man himself, there's been virtually nothing.
You see, William Swanson, Raytheon's $7 million-a-year chief executive, is the beneficiary of another of life's rules, though this one has undoubtedly been written before: Timing is everything.
Swanson had the fabulous fortune to see his plagiarism exposed the same week that Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan admitted using significant portions of another writer's work in her debut novel, ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life."
In the week since the revelations, Viswanathan's entire world seems to have tumbled down around her. The publishing house of the victimized writer wouldn't accept her apology. Her own publisher has recalled her book from store shelves.
You can be fairly certain that the second work in her two-book deal isn't going to appear in your local bookshop anytime soon.
But for whatever bad reason, maybe sexism, maybe ageism, maybe racism, maybe good old-fashioned elitism, Swanson appears to be walking away scot-free. Raytheon's lead director, Warren Rudman (yes, that Warren Rudman), said he was sure his board would continue to stand behind its CEO. Swanson issued a statement in which he expressed regret.
Makes you wonder what some of Swanson's rules were that didn't make the cut. Did his first draft have pearls like, ''All employees must wash hands before returning to work." Perhaps, ''Line forms to the right." Or maybe, ''Yield to pedestrians in crosswalk."
More important, it makes you wonder about some of the numbers in Raytheon's ledgers. If we can't believe his words, what about his math?
These days, it's not enough to be a rank-and-file CEO anymore, not enough to collect the skyrocketing salaries and the multimillion-dollar bonuses and unimaginably enormous stock grants. Egos need to be fed. You have to be a sage. You have to be celebrated. And for that, you have to put your thoughts into print.
In an interview with the Globe last week, Swanson explained away his plagiarism by saying: ''You should understand I'm not a writer. It's not my profession, and I don't know how to do it."
Good one, Bill.
If you have two plagiarists, one an impressionable teenager caught in the vortex of high-powered agents, editors, and a relatively newfangled literary production company helping to shape the plot of her work, and the other a supposedly seasoned CEO of a Fortune 500 company striving for the kind of fame he doesn't deserve, which should be called to greater account?
Yet, Viswanathan's been destroyed; Swanson released a statement cracking a joke about there being ''no original rules."
The guy's right about one thing: He's not a writer, but, in print anyway, a fraud, and an especially lucky one at that.
Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com. 
