Tom Graves / Tetradian

This one’s on the travails of being an innovative thinker who publishes on the web…

Whilst writing an article on the enterprise-architecture and the Shirky Principle that I’ll post later today, I needed to add a reference to my old Sidewise article about the role of the business-anarchist. So, like anyone else would, I did a quick Google search for my own post. Didn’t find it at first (turns out I needed to refine the search with ‘sidewise’). But up near the top of the results, I found an interesting-looking article: ‘The Rise of the Business Anarchist – R2 Global Meshwork‘, dated 31 May 2011. The first few words, as shown in the Google search-results, looked interesting too:

If you work in a large organisation, no doubt you’ll have analysts everywhere; you may well be one yourself. You know who they are, …

So click on the link. Look at the first few sentences. Then realisation: wait a moment, this looks a bit familiar, doesn’t it…? Very familiar, in fact?

Yup. It’s scraped, word for word, line for line, format for format, from my original Sidewise post ‘The Rise of the Business Anarchist‘, dated 24 Aug 2009. But in this case, credited solely to Robin Wood, the apparent owner of that website. No attribution, no link to the original, no nothing.

Not impressed.

Seems that the only way on the website that I can complain about this somewhat extreme example of plagiarism is by becoming a ‘member’ of the ‘R2 Meshwork’ – which means that I need to be personally approved by the perpetrator of the plagiarism itself. Hmm… don’t think that’ll work… Hence the only option I have left is to make it public here.

Oh the joys of plagiarism… hey ho…

Forgot to mention some new posts up on the SideWise weblog:

• What do shareholders own? – rethinking the implications of ‘ownership’ in business, particularly the notion that the shareholders own the company
• The reverse-test – on a nicely sardonic post by Fiona Czerniawska about rewriting marketing puffery
• 10, 100, 1000, 10000 – ballpark figures for the numbers of hours it takes to achieve the minimum for four specific levels of skill, and what those skills-levels look like in practice, mapped to the Cynefin framework

More to follow, but hope that’ll be useful for now.

Following up a recommendation from Shawn Callahan of Australian narrative-knowledge consultancy Anecdote, I’ve started a new weblog, thinking side-wise.

This existing weblog has developed a more technical emphasis around enterprise architecture, together with an assortment of other personal themes, all of which would best be described as somewhat esoteric. The new weblog is for a more general business-executive audience, exploring how to create new possibilities, new opportunities and options in business by ‘thinking side-wise’ about the structure and nature of business, and its role within the broader enterprise of society at large. Some of these ideas will no doubt seem strange, confusing, controversial, provocative, even downright disruptive – but that’s the whole point when we’re aiming to create constructive change, surely?

So to start off in the right spirit, the first main post should be suitably challenging for most business execs: “What do shareholders own?” (The question itself should seem harmless enough; the real answer isn’t – especially for business. )

Please let others know that these ideas are out there: Share and Enjoy, if you would?