In last Friday’s post “Noted Sales Guru Caught Plagiarizing?“, I brought sales guru Bob Beck (author of the book “Mutual Respect”) to task for material found on his website that was copied from other sources. After that posting, two things happened.
First, a number of other people contacted me with examples of material associated with Beck that was clearly taken from earlier sources. Some of those took the form of comments to the original post.
Second, I received the following email from Beck:
Anyone who knows me personally and my work knows I would not plagiarize, anything, ever! I have no need to do that, I have years of experience, written a few books and hundreds of articles. I was shocked, embarrassed, and disappointed when I saw the personal accusations and character assault in the blog today. So what’s up with the similarities?
I employee people and interns regularly. Their job is to prospect, help with proposals and offer content they can contribute. In this particular case an intern that will remain nameless, shared his college thesis with me and thought I could use a lot of the information to make a compelling sales whitepaper. He was trying to build his value and impress me with his thought process. It never remotely crossed my mind he took some of the information from an obscure article that was posted on the internet in 2001. I did find one intern copies articles (only because someone told) and he is no longer with us. I would expect the person who originally wrote some of this information to call me and ask me where some of this information came from vs. just blasting out an email telling people “I was caught” doing something I didn’t do!
The blog ( The CEO’s Trusted Advisor) has not had an article or any contented added to it for at least a year, maybe even two. I understand have no choice but to take 100% responsibility since my name is on the whitepaper and one particular proposal that was written. The whitepaper has been deleted from my site, the intern is no longer with us and apologies from me to the original authors. Again a phone call would have been reasonable as a way to alert me to the situation. I hate “copiers”, I have had a ton of my articles and presentations copied over the years and it makes me sick every time it happens!
I confess that I don’t know what to think at this point. The examples of apparently stolen material appear to be more extensive than Beck’s email suggests. On the other hand, it’s hard for me to believe that Beck would willingly put his reputation at risk by so blatantly lifting content from other writers.
I find the tone of his note troubling. He seems to think that he’s the victim as the result of being “outed” online. That’s how things work nowadays. Also, I happen to know that some people have contacted him in the past, so either he was aware of the problem earlier or doesn’t check the email for his websites.
And I’m not seeing any suggestion that he provide some form of restitution to the people whose material was stolen. Quite the contrary, he adds insult to injury by calling it “obscure” and criticizes a website for not being updated recently, as if its contents became fair game when some imaginary “sell by” date was exceeded.
Furthermore, why should the guilty parties “remain nameless”? Why should Beck bother to protect them, if they were ripping him off by selling him plagiarized content? That doesn’t make any sense. If they’re guilty and he’s a victim, wouldn’t he want to ensure that they’d never rip anyone else off again?
And aren’t the writings of a sales guru supposed to reflect his own thinking, not that of some intern, much less of some other sales expert? I realize that ghostwriting is not uncommon in business circles, but that’s usually for CEOs and other semi-literates. One expects more from somebody who’s being hired as an expert.
Anyway, I’m curious what you readers think. Here’s a poll:
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