It was not April 1

There was an attachment to the email. Open it. It was the abstract of this "tech paper", which summarizes the main ideas about a potential super D-O-G. No any phrase about where the ideas come from, no any references, no any words about team efforts, not even a short acknowledgement ... Hope there is no surprise to you, because you have already read about the email body - same style.

I took a deep breath, looked at a calendar (this calendar will be mentioned again later) hanging on my cubicle wall - April 1 is still about 4 months away. So it is not a practical joke!

Let's pause here, and do some analysis about this scenario.

1. All the persons mentioned are O.H. contractors.

2. We are at our client site to work with their own team, and contractors from other companies.

3. Under our client's direct management and supervision, the overall team had delivered several robot guard dog variations: Kunming Dog, German Shepherd, American Bulldog ...(for guard dog lovers, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guard_dog)

4. With the accumulated knowledge and user experiences in the past several years, after many brainstorming sessions, the big team now have a draft or initial blueprint for a super dog project.

5. Now one contractor hardly delivered any major component successfully in the precedent projects, or worked as the architect or chief designer for super dog, used the whole team's work as one's own ---- read the above email content description again if you disagree with me ---"tech paper abstract"?

6. The tech journal is an O.H. publication, you can reasonably think that it does observe the basic publication related laws and ethics - it only needs to have at least ONE O.H. employee as the c0-author(s) per paper.

7. The "congratulation" announcement was not sent to any team member of the client side or other company.

8. The "congratulation" announcement was sent to ALL O.H. contractors at this client site. Majority of them do not work on D.O.G.

9. The person who sent the "congratulation" announcement was an O.H. line manager (who got the promotion the previous day) and a D.O.G. sub-product maintenance engineer.

10. There are the dual-chain-of-command for us: work related orders were from our client supervisors; human resource issues - submit time card, etc., were within the O.H. management scope.

Hey, I hope you now see what was terribly wrong! Someone, as a contractor, stole the joint-team's ideas, presented to his /her (gender fuzzy) own company tech journal as one's own original work --- "Original" requirement is re-iterated on each and every edition of the Journal. This person's line manager was very happy about it, wanted all O.H. employees at the site to know the good news, but somehow strangely did not want to share the wonderful news with other D.O.G. teammates or those in the project management.

You do not need to be a contractor yourself to understand what is the most important thing for a contractor company: reputation. That's why most contractor companies emphasize very much on the highest legal and ethical standards. Say, would you contract a roof-repair work to a company which has the reputation that its employees steal from the customers' homes? For the same reason, even the calendar we got each year from the company always has the topic of "business conduct".