The Secret's Out!

I have two stories. The first is from the world of sports and the second from the world of manufacturing. First: Backup quarterback Karl Sweetan and another man tried to sell a playbook to a rival team. Here is the story: "NFL quarterback in the 1960s and 70s who was accused of orchestrating a scheme to steal a L.A. Rams playbook in 1972: first-round draft pick of Detroit in 1965; tied NFL record by throwing a 99-yard touchdown pass to Pat Studstill in 1966; also played for New Orleans and Los Angeles; along with his cousin, was charged with wire fraud and interstate transportation of stolen property and arrested by the FBI after Saints coach J.D. Roberts notified the league that Sweetan wanted to sell him a L.A. Rams playbook; indictments were never sought because the value of the playbooks were estimated at less than that would make it a federal crime..." An now a much bigger story from the early 1990's: an executive from General Motors went to work for Volkswagen and was accused of stealing blueprints for a yet-to-be-built factory. Here are the details from C|Net news The most colorful and high-stakes case embroiled General Motors and Volkswagen for much of the 1990s. The cased hinged on a ring of Latin employees led by a hard-charging Basque expatriate named Jose Ignacio Lopez de Arriortua. Lopez was head of purchasing for GM and defected abruptly to VW in 1993. GM accused Lopez of masterminding the theft of more than 20 boxes of documents on research, manufacturing and sales. Much of the allegedly pilfered data involved blueprints for a super-efficient assembly plant--a factory that GM believed would topple VW's dominance of the small-car market in emerging markets of Eastern Europe, China and elsewhere. The world's largest international corporate espionage case officially ended in 1997, when VW admitted no wrongdoing but settled the civil suit by agreeing to pay GM $100 million in cash and spend $1 billion on GM parts over seven years. In 1998, German prosecutors dropped criminal charges of industrial espionage against Lopez, who resigned from VW in 1996 and was injured in a car accident in Spain two years later. But Germany made Lopez donate $224,845 to charity.

I am in total agreement.

My firneds borther works in Warid, An Arab mobile operator in Pakistan. They developed a service where a person calling his frined can here a song rather than a tone. The idea was then taken up by another mobile operator before Warid i.e. Mobilink. It was an obvious case of corporate espiange. Mobilink had already lost market share to new entrants with Warid being its biggest rivals. Ultimaely it came out iwth the service before warid.

Stories of Corporate mis-governance is all to frequent today, and the Coke/Pepsi secret case is just one of many leaked secret stories we see today. Just last month former HP Exec Karl Kamb, Jr. was cited for hiring a Dell Japan Exec, Katsumi Iizuka to deliver printer plans. Today's digital landscape allows grander leaks to occur over email, IM, USBs iPods or any other portable device.