Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed . . .

"The wise man learns more from the fool's question than the fool learns from the wise man's answer." Raymond "Red" Reddington on Blacklist, 2015. Love that quote, and love discerning the intents and motivations of fools during feeble dialogues. But, I'd never use it without attribution; that would be some form of plagiarism.

Those are murky waters, though. So many things have been said in so many ways over the centuries that it is easy to innocently make what sounds and feels like an original expression your own property without realizing that it first appeared in the literature decades or centuries ago.

The recent musical dust-up involving Tom Petty and Sam Smith apparently illustrates the innocent side of possibilities; Brian Williams' shameless appropriation of real or imgined experiences of others seems to cross the line, then erase it.

The fool/wise man statement echos an admonition from the titanic scholar, thinker, teacher, and humanitarian of the 12th century, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon of Cordoba. Maimonides was a legendary influence on Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and a contemporary (and acquaintance) of Thomas Aquinas.

In another illustration, we make much of the so-called Golden Rule, as promulgated in the Christian New Testament scripture. In fact, the core of the Rule was expressed by the great rabbi, scholar, and commentator, Hillel, before the advent of the Common Era, and more than a century before the issue of the relevant Gospel of Matthew. Without that common foundation, we would not be able to get cute with the notion of a Platinum Rule in customer/client relationships, or the obverse of the Platinum, the Silver Rule.

Our working world is filled to overflowing with time-worn and time-honored concepts that have been retitled, rebranded, and repackaged for new audiences. Lean, for example, bundles up several proven concepts into a neat package, but contains elements of many traditional programmatic approaches to quality management, cost control, consistency, flexibility, continuous improvement, Deming, Juran, and more. And, much of what makes up lean comes directly from long-dead Henry Ford in his book of some 90 years ago.

Fulfillment, pooling, visibility, pay for performance, labour management - all have deep roots in traditional practices. What's different? Principally, the availability and power of technology enablers for the concepts.

So, we need to have our antennae up at all times, to recognize what is truly new, and different, and game changing - and adapt and build to leverage the advantage the breakthroughs can bring. At the same time, we need to identify what among the new and improved offerings in the marketplace is merely yesterday's poisson du jour now masquerading as cioppino.

In a corollary, what's new is not necessarily the silver bullet we've been looking for, and what's old might just be exactly what we need. Meanwhile, back at the plagiarism ranch, borrowing from the observations and writings of the past is encouraged, and gains respectability by donning the cloak of research. That is valuable, and not a sin, a moral flaw appearing only when the researcher copies the syntheses and conclusions of earlier research in place of forming his or her own summaries and key findings from examining the work of others.

All in all, our supply chain management responsibility is to do right - for suppliers, for service providers, for customers, for associates, for peer executives, for enterprise success, and for the brave investors and shareholders who have risked much.

The rest is commentary, to cite Hillel.