MORE on: AIRS is Plagiarizing?

I posted the following message on Thursday of the past week: AIRS is plagiarizing? Someone forwarded me Lou Adler's Newsletter yesterday and the very first paragraph states: "Question of the Week: A few dozen people asked this week if AIRS has a license to use our Performance-based Interviewing class. The answer is NO! We understand that AIRS has copied this information from our Performance-based Hiring and Interviewing class and from Lou's book, Hire With Your Head. As the originators of Performance-based Hiring and Performance-based Interviewing we can only speculate as to why AIRS did not properly give full attribution." What's up with this? This isn't the first time I've heard rumors about AIRS regarding this kind of activity. What's the buzz? Do you know anything? Tell me what's happenin'.

Someone here on the EDGE blog commented:
Lou Adler has a right to be pissed off. Has it happened before, you ask? Check out the comments this recent thread on ERE.net's discussion groups and decide for yourself.
And, like you, I have heard of other things.
So if AIRS does this, why do they do it? Maybe it's tough for a company that feels it has a reputation as a leading trainer to maintain, to admit that they can't come up with enough new ideas themselves, and have to take from elsewhere.
The only problem is, if you don't attribute properly and/or get permission when it's content beyond what falls under Congress' Fair Use exemption, you can get yourself into copyright lawsuits.

So, perusing that string as suggested I found this intriguing nugget from an AIRS student: “…I can say that they (AIRS) rarely, if ever, give credit for anything they teach to someone outside of AIRS. That is also evident in the newsletters I receive from them. I will say that Shally, Glenn and Maureen had given me, through their own FREE venues, about 80% of the information I received in that one expensive day last year.”

Glenn Gutmacher had asked, in the first of the string’s responses, (and it was hard to miss the terse, ticked-off intonation): Curiously, your cited example did not include any of the boolean NOT inurl and intitle terms that need to follow site:www.linkedin.com KEYWORDS in order to make sure you only get profiles and not the "junk" results of LinkedIn answers pages, directory pages, job postings, etc., when you run that type of search. Did AIRS cover that, too? Indeed, did AIRS give Shally any credit for innovating this search type during their webinar?

What’s up with this groundswell of rumbling that AIRS is taking other peoples’ stuff, repackaging it, and reselling it at greatly enhanced prices? Is it sour grapes or is it for real?

Maybe we all in this sourcing content development business should be flattered; you know that old saw about Imitation being the best form of Flattery. I’m not buyin’ it, though. I believe Imitation is the best form of Thievery.

Back in July of this year (2007) I received a mysterious missive in my email that stated: Hi Maureen: This is ________ (we spoke through MySpace not long ago). It is imperative I speak with you regarding a very serious matter regarding protecting your trade practices as soon as possible. Thank-you!!

At first I ignored it; thinking this was some kooky spam correspondence designed to get me to call about some product. But it came again: Hi Maureen: I'd like to speak with you regarding some unfair business practices and plans of other companies to use your information/training/classes in an unethical way. Please get in touch w/ me. Thanks ;-)

I looked hard at it and picked up the telephone and called. In a nutshell, what I heard (from an ex-insider at AIRS) was a disturbing tale that AIRS was planning on having someone within the organization purchase my MagicMethod course, then reformat it and resell the material. An avid fan, this person was greatly disturbed by this proposition (having, reportedly, strongly advised AIRS to contact me to work out some kind of licensing agreement for telephone sourcing training, which customers were clamoring for; and having been rebuffed on same advice and told words to the effect: "What do we need her for? We'll have _______ purchase her course, reformat it and put our own out.") This person felt compelled to warn me and named names. Believing that the fastest path is a straight line, I contacted AIRS:

I am a telephone names sourcer and I am very active in training others on the technique. Someone called me from within your organization to tell me that it was the intention of AIRS to take my telephone names sourcing training, make it their own (repackaged) and put it out there for public consumption.

I was stunned, as you can imagine, by the allegation, but as I believe the fastest way to put a stop to such misunderstandings is to go directly to the source.

As Sr. Director of Training I would imagine if this were the intent of AIRS (and this person DID NOT say you were involved) that you would know of any such surreptitious planning.

I am not against any collaboration with AIRS regarding my training products but as they are copyrighted please understand I will strongly defend any trespass upon them.

I hope we can clear the “air” on this unpleasant situation.

Soon (that very same day) after I sent that email I received communication from their Sr. Director of Training informing me that my message had been delivered to Chris Forman, the CEO of AIRS. Very soon (within an hour or two as I recall) he called, denying all of my charges above, telling me they had “no plans” to do telephone training and in the event they did decide to go there they’d “be in touch”. It was also imparted to me somewhere along the line of communications that this particular informant was a disgruntled, fired ex-contractor and this was really, only, at its heart, a "personnel" issue - I would be remiss to leave that part out, now, in this retelling. Mollified, deciding not to hold my breath and thinking “whatever” I continued on my way, doing what I can do, letting drop the whole unfortunate messiness from my mind, including the Informant's last words to me: "Be careful & keep your eyes open."

And then Lou Adler’s Newsletter shows up in my email Wednesday night and it says, electrifyingly: A few dozen people asked this week if AIRS has a license to use our Performance-based Interviewing class. The answer is NO! We understand that AIRS has copied this information from our Performance-based Hiring and Interviewing class and from Lou's book, Hire With Your Head. As the originators of Performance-based Hiring and Performance-based Interviewing we can only speculate as to why AIRS did not properly give full attribution.

I don’t know that I’ve been harmed (yet). But I don’t also know that some of my material hasn’t, indeed, been “repackaged” and isn’t being resold now as part of their “Fearless Cold Calling” product (hey, wait a minute, didn’t Chris tell me in July that AIRS had “no plans” to go into telephone training?) for $595 for a four hour online session. Oh, maybe Chris said "telephone sourcing" training, but when you tout, on the session's front page, "Planning and preparation techniques" (did this come out of my MagicMethod lesson "Five Ps - Plan Prepare Penetrate Persevere Prosper"?) and "Ways to get past gatekeepers ethically and effortlessly" (every single one of my MagicMethod modules covers Gatekeeper approaches) I feel a line (or two) may be being crossed.

I don't know that what Lou's organization has said is or isn't true; but I do know one thing - you have to be mightily concerned to put out a statement like that (or this)! I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know. But rest assured - I intend to find out. There’s too much smoke here for a forest fire not to be burning.

Appearance is Everything
Several AIRS courses "appear" to have content familiar with what I've seen Shally, Glenn and Lou put out:
Googling
Xtreme Lab
Performance Hiring
I wonder if Shally's recent linkedin stuff and his live.com material are in jeopardy?

"So if AIRS does this, why do they do it?"

And for those of you thinking this sounds like sour grapes – I’m not the only one who can teach telephone training effectively – but I am one who has done it and from what I’ve seen from the front page “snippets” contained at the links above, there are some very disturbing similarities that stretch beyond the telephone training.

I invite my sourcing training brethren to join in this cacophony to AIRS to answer these very serious charges. I invite anyone who has taken the latest "Fearless Cold Calling" to contact me, or Shally, or Lou, or Glenn with your "impressions" of "similarity" between our materials and theirs. It's time these "rumors" get laid to rest.

glenn.gutmacher at gmail.com
lou at adlerconcepts.com
shally at jobmachine.net

“Nothing sanitizes like sunlight.”

Respectfully,

Maureen Sharib
Telephone Names Sourcer/MagicMethod Trainer
513 899 9628
TechTrak.com, Inc.
maureen at techtrak.com