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"Don't do what I did"

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

A 2001 paper by Moen begins with the quote ?Don?t let your employees do to you what you did to your former boss? which is presented as The golden rule of protecting trade secrets, as de?ned by Intel general counsel Roger
Borovoy (in turn citing Jackson; Inside Intel: Andrew Grove and the Rise of the World?s Most Powerful Chip Company; 1997.)

In the experience of LBE at Exxon Corporate Research, this guideline was in fact followed. As a manager advanced, the very first thing the manager would do would be to seal off practices that the manager had employed in his previous position. As one example, one scientist, notable for not obtaining permission to make outside publications, immediately tightened the screws on the formalities for requiring release AFTER he had advanced. Another scientist, notable for not placing much content in his papers (in fact, a unit "the ______" was named after him for the unit of least publishable data) instituted INTERNAL peer review after he advanced, to upgrade the "quality" of publications. [This is one reason, of many, IPBiz does not believe in peer-to-patent.]

Full post as published by IPBiz on February 15, 2008 (boomark / email).