When I wrote my first book, The Leaders Workbook (http://TheLeadersWorkbook.com), it started out as a co-operation with a business parter and friend. My friend was a teacher of entrepreneurship, a developer of mentor programs, as well as an author. I looked to him as someone with expertise, knowledge and understanding of how to write books.

We worked out the concept, decided for a structure, and started to write. Me being me, I said the book must be written in English, and that there will be no compromise on quality. Now, my friends English skills were not something to brag about, and after some trial and error, we agreed that he would write in Norwegian, and I would translate to English as soon as I had finished writing my part.

One day we were working together, he showed me a couple of chapters he had written. These chapters were of very high quality - both from a language perspective, and from a content perspective. Right to the point, discussing the very topic. Knowing what he had produced previously, I was very positively surprised, and let him know that I liked the writings very much. I told him that these only need translation, no re-writing, as most of his other work would require.

My friend said thank you and accepted my honest praise.

We kept on working for some time, and when I needed a break, I picked up one of the magazines he had laying in his office. Leaning back, sipping on a cup of tea, I indulged myself to being inspired by the magazine.
In the magazine was an article about one of the topics we were having in the book, so I started to read it. I must have come half way through the article before all my alarm bells sounded. Loud and clear. To have my suspicions verified, I went over to fetch the chapters he had proposed for the book. It took only a few minutes to verify that both the chapters were direct rip-offs of two different articles in the magazine.

Upon confrontation of the fact, he just said «You know Kai, this is how I work».

I was shocked. It did take a while for me to actually admit that I was shocked. This was not the first time we had the same talk - being a teacher in a Norwegian school, you can «copy» parts of publications for use in the teaching. And I had explained, at least in my opinion, loud and clear that in a book, copying is not something we can accept.

Plagiarism, or the act of presenting someone else’s work as your own, is illegal and considered unethical in most cultures. If you have ever been an academic, you know that your thesis work should state references to almost any source that you have been in touch with during your thesis work. The collection of references can be tedious work. The adding of foot notes and quotes can seem like a waste of time.

It is not.

Using someone else’s work, and promote it as your own, is wrong. Most of us will agree on that. Some, though, seem to have the idea that it is wrong only when someone else does it. My friend would be very angry if someone would use even small parts of his book on mentoring without actually buying the book. Yet, he saw nothing wrong in ripping off someone else’s articles, and present them to me as his own.

I have no explanation to this behavior, if you have, please share in the comments below. What I do know, is that I strongly disagree with such methods. It may slow me down in my writing, the fact that I force myself to write each word by myself, and that I try to add references when relevant and when using something from someone else. Of course, I may fail to add all references from time to time. I am human, after all. But if I discover an error, I do my best to fix it.

Like I did with my second book - The Cloud Security Rules (http://thecloudsecurityrules.com) - when we discovered that one of the co-authors had delivered content that was clearly plagiarized, we immediately pulled the book from the market, and started a re-editing process to change the affected materials and add non-plagiarized content instead.

Today, my friend and business partner no longer is a friend of mine, nor a business partner of mine. I decided that the quality of his work was not at the level I wanted, and I did not want to risk that some of the content of the book would have content copied from somewhere else. After all, I plan to sell a million copies, so if there is something stolen in it, someone is bound to find it. Besides, it is just wrong. And illegal.

So, I pulled him off the project, explaining my point of view. I was then totally surprised to discover his anger, his rage towards me. Perhaps I am naïve, perhaps I just think people are better than some turn out to be. But his anger threw me off my feet.
I thought he would calm down, and accept the choice I made. I thought he would be possible to reason with.

A few weeks later, we decide to meet. A meeting where he accuses me of stealing from him. He has the nerve to accuse me of ripping off content he wrote, and use it in my book. I guess I should have seen this coming, and have been prepared for such allegations. I explained to him that non of his content had made the book (I did not tell him that it was because I found it too sloppy, and that I did not want to spend my time rewriting it all), and that I could not take the risk of being associated with (his) plagiarism.

I even invited him to go through the whole book, so he could see with his own eyes that the content was mine, entirely. And I said that if he found anything that he had written in there, I would be happy to add his name as author. Of course he could not find such content. He knew, I knew. And I thought the problem was solved.

Only to discover some months later that the same friend and business partner (past sense by now, mind you!) was talking to my other friends, partners and network, telling them I had ripped off his book. I only learned about this because some of my friends are more honest than others. And they came to me, and asked for my point of view, my story.

I learned something very important in this process. Not all your friends will stay by your side when you need them. Some will actually stab you in the back instead. It may be my selection of friends. Only a handful actually came to me with the story. Most just accepted the allegations at face value, and did not even bother to contact me.

For the past year, I tried to keep the story of my previous friend close, thinking I would try not to ruin his life even if he obviously does his best to make mine a challenge. Then, last week, another co-author of mine was caught cheating, and I felt the whole story come crashing down again. I made a post earlier this week explaining The Roer Group view on plagiarism, and I realized I also had to share this story. You will notice that I have not named my previous friend, knowing that those of you who know me will have no hard time figuring out who he is. When you do, please keep it to yourself. I do not want to see a flame war. I just want to share my side of the story, and my take in plagiarism.

I am no fan of plagiarism. Just like I am no fan of unethical behavior. I do what I do because I believe it is possible to change the world into an even better place. I believe there is hope also for those who are too afraid to confront and investigate. While I wait for them to wake up, I weep. Make no mistake, it does hurt to have your integrity questioned. And even more so when people you consider close, question you.

This TED.com video is quite fascinating, explaining how our language could be the root cause of the human success. A well spent 20 minutes!

Video not working? Try at TED.com directly: http://www.ted.com/talks/mark_pagel_how_language_transformed_humanity.html

This is the first text I really write on the iPad 2. I have connected a bluetooth keyboard to it, which makes the iPad a great writing tool.

I have several different writing tools on my Macbook Pro. Now the challenge is to find good tools for the iPad, preferably tools that work with the tools I already use. Especially, my love for Scrivener, the best writers tool I have found by far, requires some searching - since it is not currently available for iPad.

The search for Scrivener for iPad turned my eyes to DNoteIt, a note writing application for the iPad. One of many. The reason for me to try it out, is that it is supposed to sync with Scrivener on the Mac. Time will show for sure!

My plans for the iPad is for it to replace my Macbook Pro. I travel light, and the lighter I can travel, while still bringing all I need, the better. And the travel light principle is true for my writing tools too. The fewer apps and tools I need, the better. In other words, the more the writing app does, that relates to my kind of use, the more happy I become. My writers toolkit need to help with the following:

- writing blog posts (like this one)
- writing books (mostly non-fiction, but also playing with fiction)
- writing reports, proposals and letters (for my business)

For these needs, I use different tools, including Scrivener, Pages, inDesign and BlogPress. I also use various apps for syncing information, notes and resarch, including Evernote and Dropbox. And for collaborative writing, I use Google Docs, Mind42.com (great for collaborating on mind maps) as well as the Wordpress app.

There are always quirks needed to be sorted out when using a new application.

* Some quirks are user error (PEBCAK - Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard), which generally means that some time must be spent on learning how to use the tools.

* Some quirks are based on the fact that we (people) are highly habitual. Trying something new, always comparing to what we know or like, mean we also need some time to adjust and adopt to the new environments.

*And finally, some quirks are part of the technology.

Let me explain:

I use the iPad 2 with an external Apple Bluetooth keyboard. This is a great companion to the iPad if you plan to use it for writing. Especially if you are like me, who find the screen tapping writing style to be slow, inaccurate and quickly to become annoying.

Enters the quirk: Using DNoteIt in Edit mode, with the external keyboard, brings up the On-screen keyboard of the iPad - except it only show a black background - not the keys themselves (see the image).

It actually took me a while to realize what was going on - as you can see on the image, half of my screen just turned black, and only some special symbols are shown. Initially, I had no idea what happend, and why. I spent some time trying to turn it off, believing it was a special edit mode. At one point, I thought the whole app just had crashed, and only after looking through the help file, did I figure out what was going on.

Now that I know what it is, it does not bother me much, except I would love to see an update where the on-screen keyboard is not shown at all when an external keyboard is attached. I guess the reason it glitches like it does, are those added keys - very handy when using the default keyboard. But not something I really need with the external one.

I will give DNoteIt a try over the next weeks. So far, except for the keyboard issue, which may very well be an iOS issue for what I know, is the only thing I do not like with the app. And the strong point of being able to sync with Scrivener is a key feature for me.

On a final note - I must admit I just love the way technology is making it easier and easier to do what I love - write!

What are your favorite writing tool? Which software do you prefer?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I am waiting for a train to arrive. I arrived early, so I got some 30 minutes to kill. Now, I could of course bring out Angry Birds and kick virtual pigs for half-an-hour, but that is not very productive - unless you are a butcher.

Having 30 minutes to spare offer me time to reflect. I am granted a moment in relative peace, where I can contemplate on todays results, and tomorrows actions.

My focus in this moment of reflection was how I can improve the actions I take, so they can create better results. Much to my surprise, the answer I gave to myself was: "You should set aside more time each day to reflect."

Quite an expected answer from someone who wrote a book on the topic. It shows that even I can find more time to reflect upon my leadership and my actions.

I will do a test for a month. I will spend minimum 15 minutes every day to reflect. And I will share my findings with you.

What are you doing to improve your reflection? What tools or tricks do you use? What tips do you have?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

This is a crosspost from The Leaders Workbook .