The following true story explains why stupid people rarely get away with evil schemes and why it’s the smart ones you’ve got to watch. On the other hand, as you’ll see, there’s also a sting in the ‘tale’…

A couple of years ago I was an online marketing strategy consultant for a major corporation here in Australia. I was leading a project to create a huge amount of content for the company’s website – both to create more compelling content for our target market and for search engine optimization purposes. As part of the project, I arranged for subject matter experts within the company to write a bunch of articles.

In accordance with the company’s policy to have the legal team review everything intended to be published, one of the subject matter experts in question – let’s call her Sarah – submitted her article, along with the sources she used, to one of the lawyers for review.

When the lawyer – let’s call her Michelle – reviewed both the article and the sources, she discovered that the article was, in fact, a word-for-word copy of one of the source articles. Rather shocked that someone who had, in fact, gone to university and was working for a major corporation, considered it okay to blatantly copy someone else’s article, Michelle advised Sarah that she couldn’t copy anyone else’s work and would have to come up with an original article.

A few days later Sarah returned to Michelle with a new article. Michelle reviewed the new article… only to discover that, although it looked somewhat different, it was exactly the same as the one Sarah had originally submitted.

Stunned that Sarah had the audacity to re-submit the very same article, Michelle confronted Sarah and asked her why she had handed in the same article. Hadn’t Michelle explained that copying someone else’s work was (a) not what the company wanted, (b) plagiarism and (c) copyright infringement? Hadn’t she specifically asked Sarah to produce something original?

Sarah gave Michelle a quizzical look and said:

“But I changed the font.”

No, I’m not kidding.

I could hardly believe it when Michelle told me this story. I don’t know which I found more appalling: that someone had made it through university and into a major corporation believing it was acceptable to plagiarize… or that such a person could be so devious or stupid (or both) as to think that she could change the font and no-one would notice that the words were the same.

But when I told my mother this story, she wasn’t surprised at all. She looked at me and said:

“Anna, what you need to realise is that stupid people think you are as stupid as they are.”

Think about it… it’s true!

Now, this is a good thing in that, if you’re smart, you can see through a stupid person’s attempt to trick or undermine you (not that all, or even most, stupid people are devious – just the ones who are).

There’s just one problem: what if you really are as stupid as them?

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 27th, 2010 at 8:22 am and is filed under Feature, Leadership and Management, Wisdom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.