What defines stealing? 6

[MadMango]

In context to thread732-316391

Is offering a separate and different proposal of work to a client "stealing" when it is the client that selects which proposal suits them the best? Or is it the access to the client in the first place that is the ethical dilemma?

"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."


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[satchmo]

Not sure about "stealing", but if you know the details bid you have to beat and can make your bid more attractive to the client it is definitely "cheating".

 

[casseopeia]

MM I agree with you. I don't see much wrong with it. Stealing would be taking working in progress when leaving your previous employer, then soliciting the Client to transfer the contract. Competing with your former employer for new work is OK in my book, but I never seem to win those arguments.

"Gorgeous hair is the best revenge." Ivana Trump

 

[TheTick]

It is stealing. It is using deceit, violating an agreement (or at least a strongly implied fiduciary trust) in order to diminish the value of the company's intangible assets.

 

[dik]

Cass is correct... any new work is fair game... and good luck on your future endeavours...

Dik

 

[jmw]

The point is that the manner in which the clients were acquired by the company means they lay claim to ownership of that data. It cost them money to build their client list.
But if you don't deprive them of the data, you may walk with knowledge of who is who.

One of the main reasons companies recruit from competitors, especially in sales, is the client list they bring with them...... not contracts or enquiries or commercial information, simply the client list.

But some industries seem more ethical than others or to accept certain things as more acceptable than others do.


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[stevenal]

Did you call the client company's receptionist to identify the proper person, or did you pull out your old contact list to dial up the person you needed directly? Did you respond to a public RFP process, or did you use inside knowledge gained from your old position to know that that a proposal was even being requested? Did you use inside knowledge regarding the competing proposal to enhance your own?

New work = fair game is an over-simplification.

 

[msquared48]

If it is targeted access to the client, based on a previous contact through the former employer, I consider it unethical.

However, if, in an honest random cold call list of the phone book, you run across the same client, the situation gets more cloudy. Here, it's not necessarily what you know, it's what the former boss could think that is the problem. In other words, it's what it appears to be to others that becomes the problem.

Personally? I would steer clear of all his old clients.

Mike McCann
MMC Engineering

http://mmcengineering.tripod.com

 

[MiketheEngineer]

Agree w/ M^2 - UNLESS they called me!! And write that incident down in the notebook you keep for recording all calls - as I do!!

 

[IRstuff]

And even then, it may be irrelevant if the clients decide they want to follow you. However, even if they do that of their own volition, you may consider instituting a reasonable "non-compete" period on your own. You would wait out the 6 months or whatever before you accept any business from those clients. Even then, you should probably wait for them to contact you, rather than chasing them, unless they come out with a public RFP, in which case, no holds are barred.

TTFN
faq731-376

 

[casseopeia]

How the he!! do you randomly cold call a potential Client that you already know? By its very definition it is not possible. No one owns the Client. The Client is not a piece of property. The Client has free will to use anyone to provide needed services. Most contracts I have written even have a clause that either party may break a contract if it is in their best interest. If the Client wants to switch engineers, it is his prerogative.

Maybe you've used the same barber/hairdresser for years. But your normal barber or stylist leaves the shop and then you get a flyer in the mail with the stylist announcing their move to a different salon. So you decide to go to the same stylist at the new shop. I don;t see this as wrong, even if the flyer came from someone who left the shop and went to a different one.

"Gorgeous hair is the best revenge." Ivana Trump

 

[patprimmer]

Where does your previous employers right to eternal ownership of his clients become restrictive trading or a cartel.

People have a right to choose their suppliers and certainly here and I am pretty sure in the USA and most of the rest of the Western world this to try to restrict that is a violation of fair trading/anti trust laws.

It is stealing to take something that is certainly your bosses IP, but you are allowed to retain the experience you gained and certainly allowed to retain information that is from the public domain.

What is your bosses IP and what is fair experience can get to be a very grey area. Certainly design details and pricing is the bosses.

Names of companies who advertises for suppliers or who contact you or who are listed in phone books or even who come up on google is public domain and belong to no one. If people attend lectures, serve on committees etc and you have been to functions they attended, that makes it pretty much public domain.

The names of people in those companies is a grey area. If you know someone well it is really childish to expect to call the company and ask who is the person responsible for negotiating supply when everyone knows dam well you know who it is and you are on a first name basis with them.

It is certainly stealing to call someone you never met because you got their name of a company owned document.

Regards
Pat
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[jmw]

I think we are in danger of over thinking this.

Let me put to you what companies do and you decide who ethical companies are.

Manufacturer A is a niche market single product manufacturer who depends on agents and distributors round the world to include his product in their portfolio.
As the years go by the various agents and distributors built the market for the manufacturer until they have very significant sales globally.
Then they are bought by a major global single source company.
The new owners do nothing immediately because, despite having their own sales offices in most of the affected countries, there will be an "acclimatisation period".
But, because of the Arab Embargo or company policy or some such nonsense, they require that in future instead of the distributors simply ordering product they must now declare the application and the end user.
At the end of the year, or maybe 18 months, they pull the plug on all the distributors. In that one year they have obtained a very clear picture of who the major clients are and the key applications.
The distributors are left with enquiries but no product and no alternative product to offer.

Now though the agents and distributors may all cry "Foul!" no one takes any notice.

Most companies are realistic.
As I said above, most salesman are more highly valued for their contact lists than anything else.

The only two times I have ever know action to be taken was when, believe it or not, an employee at one company was also in the pay of a competitor and passing information directly to them.
What happened I don't know. Anyone stupid enough to do this obviously leads a Walter Mitty life style and needs treatment.
The second instance was when the local chamber of commerce wrote a snotty letter to a company about their marketing manager posing as a client and trying to obtain their competitor's prices.
Not sure what they were complaining about unless it was the subterfuge he resorted to. Most companies have and need to have a pretty good idea of competitor pricing and how they get it is to ring up and ask or get other people to ring up and ask.
Ethical?
Who knows. In the purist sense none of it is.
What is more to the point is that this is how all companies behave in order to survive. They all know this is what they are doing and what the others are doing to them.

That you may have a contact list is one thing. How you use it is another.
To use it to seek business in a fair and competitive way is one thing.
To use it to blacken or malign the former employers name or anything else is something else again.
To expect some one to throw away their contact list and go through a charade of looking surprised to find the company they visited twenty times a year for their original employer is unreasonable.

In this area I suggest that it is reasonableness that should rule, not some abstract EU court of Human rights approach to impose something idealistic and unworkable on the real world.







JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[ScottyUK]

If we apply the logic(?) of some contributors above then anything I learned in the employ of a former employer can't be used to aid my current employer's business because I 'stole' it when I quit my previous job. Other than blanking my memory - hey, I saw it in the Men in Black movie so it must be possible - I don't see any way of avoiding this. I've always thought of it as gaining experience, not stealing knowedge from my employer.


----------------------------------

If we learn from our mistakes I'm getting a great education!

 

[zdas04]

The courts have not looked kindly on non-compete clauses in contracts so the Men-in-Black mind-wipe flashy thing is not required.

After that, it just comes down to your personal values. One guy would never consider calling his contact at the last company because "it feels wrong", and the next guy will make that his first call. Neither are breaking any laws or (probably) any enforceable contract. They just have different thresholds for considering something "wrong".

If the call involves taking some project-specific knowledge (e.g., if you worked on a project bid and know what your old employer is bidding, it would probably be "stealing" to underbid him a hundred dollars on a million dollar project, and P.E. boards would likely take notice) it would probably fail the red face test for anyone.

When I was on the other side, I wouldn't take calls from an ex-employee of one of my contractors. It happened a couple of times a year and if they were friends I would say "lets talk about the family, I'm not talking about work with you". If the were just business contacts it was "call me back in a year or so". I've always felt that ethics should go both ways.

David

 

[jmw]

And when you start out on your own and want some staff, do you seek to employ them everywhere but from your last employer?

It takes two to tango:
Ultimately companies do not "own" clients.
They ought to realise that it is very difficult to win clients, extremely easy to lose them and then extraordinarily difficult to win back lost clients.
Hence: a company that looks after its clients is likely to be far more sanguine about contact lists than one that treats its clients badly.

It's that simple.

A happy client will be unlikely to move except and unless they have a personal level professional relationship with the departed employee.
But in a good company such employees who can keep good clients happy should be looked after better.

The companies that fail to understand these simple ideas (usually the ones with a CEO inspired Clichéd jingle about customer service but no customer service department) will also be the ones most concerned about such issues.

(I agree about specific project knowledge etc.)


JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[bridgebuster]

You're not providing enough information to offer an opinion, without making certain assumptions. I assume it's a private client not a public agency and your current employer was invited to submit a proposal.

The client is free to accept any offer or to reject all offers. However, because you worked on the proposal, and you wouldn't have had access to the client otherwise, and now you're going off your own after the same project it would be unethical or "stealing" because your current employer did the work in terms of the technical approach to the project.

 

[TGS4]

I'll chime in with one additional angle. This actually happened in my situation. Say you are the company "expert" (ok, the only one who does what you do), and you leave. Now, your former employer cannot ethically sell the service that you alone provided. There's nothing really for you to compete against your former employer.

As David said regarding ethics being a two-way street, how would this be handled? There's nothing to steal, because my former employer cannot ethically advise any of their clients that they offer this one specialized service. I had no ethical connundrums about contacting clients that I had previously done work with through my former employer.

I think that there are different degrees to the answer to this question depending on the seniority/specialization of the employee who leaves.

(I have seen some employers get their knickers twisted by what should be considered knowledge, and would have preferred to do the memory-wipe. Of course, that attitude is most likely why the employee left in the first place)

 

[TenPenny]

Companies do not 'own' clients, but they do 'own' the intellectual property - contacts, names, relationships, project information, etc.

In order to remain ethical, you should be careful not to use information that you gained as a result of your previous job - that could be considered information that belonged to your previous employer.

 

[looslib]

Taking a client list when you leave a company and using it to announce your availability to work for those clients is stealing. The client list belongs to the company, not you.

A client of your former company who solicits a proposal from you for work that they would have normally gone to your former company for is legal and no breach has occured.

No compete clauses may not be enforceable, but their threat is there that most people don't want to risk it.


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