Giving credit where credit is due – its importance

Giving credit where credit is due – its importance

All of us are surely aware of the funny story of the manager who demands ideas from his staffer on cost cutting. The story goes that one young staffer suggests the opening of a FedEX.com account. The manager and the rest stay silent, until the manager repeats the same idea and the whole gathering goes up in cheers. This is a funny anecdote and evokes smiles on the face. Yet it is perhaps one of the best examples of not giving credit where it is due.
Copyrights are examples of where, credit needs to be given and installed within legal precepts. This ensures that your knowledge properties are not stolen by someone else, without your approval and ensures that when used, with permission, you are still awarded the due credits. This holds true for most published work and even published ideas. Any encroachment, misuse in whole or part can be held accountable legally. Thus the law protects such property to the shade of relative safety.

However this is not quite so in the cases of work places and even personal life. An idea or a statement once exposed is immediately the property those who heard it too. This means that a great many ideas are either stolen, which is truly bad, and the cases where they are never ever exposed fearing this, which is worse. An idea that goes to the grave with its creator is indeed an idea lost to the entire humanity. This means, what which could have enriched humankind is lost, that too for the fear of theft. This is a bad reflection on the values of humanity.
These concepts tend to be not clearly defined too. If I were to voice an idea, you could tweak it slightly and present it as yours, thus avoiding blame. This is a common enough happening at workplaces where the head honcho makes hay out of the sunlight that staffers shine. Though well trained professionals tend to do it less, understanding well that these are clear cases of bad team leadership, and there is always an eye kept open for such instances in established firms with enshrined norms of work ethics, such is not necessarily the case in smaller, less established firms. There are more than one instance where the manager changes Alice to Anne and makes the staffer’s idea his own. He get a cheer and maybe an incentive, but rest assured, he had lost the newer ideas from the staffers, a loss the business will dearly pay for.

The worst scenario is in personal interactions. A clear instance is that of two friend, one of whom has a brilliant idea and the other the money to get it to work. A smart man who has an idea would not expose such an idea completely, and will keep vital key elements to himself before the whole idea is put to work in a proper and legally formal manner. He would certainly have to expose the overall idea for sure to get the money to work with, but will keep the key in his own hand until it is institutionalized. But the cases of him exposing the idea, in exuberance, and finding himself locked out after that is all too common. No amount of enmity or expression of dismay would help and what is lost is truly lost. It requires smart wording keeping enough of the idea to yourself to avoid this. Talking bluntly would be a great way to ensure. Friendships or association apart, it would help to remember that business is business.

These kinds of idea, knowledge, punch line, story line theft occurs all the time and there are many loser amongst us. But it need one to remember that for every idea thus stolen, a million have gone to the grave, never acted upon and never wielding to humanity, it fruits. Thus the need for such unscrupulous wheeler dealers need to be curtailed, their scurrilous activities curtailed. There need to be some methodology where in ideas are registered and credits are given where it is truly due.