Last week’s other plagiarist doesn’t have this excuse. He is William H. Swanson, the 57-year-old chief executive of Raytheon, the big military contractor, and a board member at Sprint Nextel. Yet his sins have gotten just a smidgeon of the attention that Ms. Viswanathan’s have. That is too bad, because in the scheme of things his character matters a lot more than hers does.

The whole situation is enough to make you wonder whether we now have lower expectations for chief executives than we do for teenagers. FOR years, Mr. Swanson has been peddling a list of common-sense maxims called “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules of Management,” which became something of a cult hit in corporate America. Raytheon published them as a small book and has given away 300,000 copies.

Warren E. Buffett liked it so much, according to Business 2.0 magazine, that he ordered dozens for friends and colleagues.

Mr. Swanson was happy to accept credit, often in an aw-shucks way that fit with his homespun ideas. If you follow the rules, he wrote at the end of the book, “maybe you too can become a leader of a company and maybe it won’t take you as long as it took me to get there.”

Last month, however, an engineer in San Diego named Carl Durrenberger read the rules and realized they were neither unwritten nor Mr. Swanson’s. In 1944, another engineer, W. J. King, published, “The Unwritten Laws of Engineering,” which contain 17 of Mr. Swanson’s 33 rules, often down to the very word.

“Promises, schedules, and estimates are necessary and important instruments in a well-ordered business,” Mr. King wrote. “Promises, schedules and estimates are important instruments in a well-run business,” Mr. Swanson wrote.

So on April 20, Mr. Durrenberger posted an item on his blog titled, “Bill Swanson of Raytheon is a Plagiarist!”

On the list of corporate sins, plagiarism obviously ranks pretty low. But it does offer a good window on a person’s integrity, which happens to be one of Raytheon’s four “core values.” And if there were any doubt that Mr. Swanson was doing something deeply unprincipled, his response erased it.

The day after the blog posting, Raytheon was fielding questions from the news media about “Swanson’s Unwritten Rules,” and Mr. Durrenberger noticed that Raytheon employees were visiting the blog. But the company’s Web site continued to list the rules and promote the book.

It wasn’t until news articles appeared that Mr. Swanson released a statement. In it, he pointed out that the book was free and that its introduction noted that he had learned many of the lessons from others. He said he regretted that “any reference to Professor King’s work was not properly credited.”

Indeed, at the end of his statement, Mr. Swanson seemed to laugh off the whole thing. “This experience has taught me a valuable lesson,” he concluded. “New rule #34: ‘Regarding the truisms of human behavior, there are no original rules.’ ”

Like Ms. Viswanathan — in fact, like a lot of teenagers trying to worm their way out of a rough spot — Mr. Swanson came up with an unsatisfying explanation that avoided the real issue. Unlike Ms. Viswanathan, he never used the word “sorry” or “apologize.”

I pointed this out to Raytheon’s top spokeswoman this week, and last night she called me to read a new statement from Mr. Swanson. This time, he did apologize — twice — and he blamed a staff member for the problem.

In 2001, Mr. Swanson gave the staff member a file of material to help prepare a presentation, and the file included Mr. King’s book, according to the statement. Mr. Swanson didn’t realize that so much of the finished product came from the book, rather than his own notes.

This may well be true, but it certainly isn’t consistent with Mr. Swanson’s previous boasts about how he came up with the rules. In the book, he wrote that they had come from advice from others and his own thoughts. In any event, he has failed his own integrity test. ” ‘Integrity,’ to me,” he writes, “is having the fortitude to do what is right when no one is watching.”

The most disappointing part of the episode is that Raytheon’s board has evidently decided that loyalty trumps principle — as people all too often do during an ethics scandal — and is giving Mr. Swanson a pass.

“We’re not happy with it, and Mr. Swanson knows that,” Warren B. Rudman, the former senator who is the company’s lead director, told me this week. But Mr. Rudman said Mr. Swanson had persuaded him that the copying was unintentional.

It makes perfect sense that Ms. Viswanathan has gotten more attention, in this newspaper and elsewhere. She was a hot young novelist whose downfall offers a chance to expound upon everything from the book business to the college-application frenzy, with a dash of Harvard schadenfreude thrown in. Mr. Swanson is an accomplished executive who did not need a book to make him rich or semifamous.

But his story is still the more important one. He runs an 80,000-employee company that holds the lives of American soldiers in its hands. His actions affect the reputation of Raytheon’s employees and chief executives generally. He is, in short, supposed to be a leader, and to quote a well-known management expert, “When things go wrong, true leaders take responsibility and rectify a mistake with speed and passion.”