Why Some "Leaders" Steal!

First They Call It Disappointing

Prof. Bassem Khafagy 05 August 2026

I have two friends who have never met. They live in different places, work in different fields, and carry the same wound about the same issue.

The first spent six months building something really valuable. A global roadmap for a project to reduce the suffering of orphaned children. Not a concept note. A full architecture, tested against the actual conditions of the places it would serve. A known NGO “leader” approached him with the sentence that opens every version of this story: “Let us work together. I can put this in front of one of the top funding agencies.”

So my friend worked harder and longer. He submitted a proposal he was proud of. Then he waited for the answer his labor had earned. What arrived was three lines: “The proposal was disappointing. It had no real value or merit.” Nothing further.

My friend asked for clarification. None came. He asked again. Silence. The idea seemed dead, and something in him accepted the verdict, because verdicts delivered with that much confidence usually get believed.

Two years later he was in a meeting where people from that same funding agency happened to be present. They came to him warmly. They thanked him for the proposal that originally carried his name. They remembered him. He is a well known public figure. Then they asked whether the two and a half million dollars they had granted to his colleague, the NGO “leader” had been enough to implement it properly.

He was shocked. Angry. Furious. But he said nothing. Nothing at all. It is unfortunate. He has been saying nothing in public about this story for twenty five years.

“Theft of money leaves you poorer. Theft of authorship leaves you doubting your own mind.”

Here is the part that matters, and it is not the money. Ask him today and he will tell you that the grant is not what he cannot forgive. It is the note. It is the sentence that said his work was disappointing.

Money can be replaced. A person can rebuild a budget. What cannot be undone is the two years he spent thinking, maybe I was not that good, two years spent quietly carrying someone else’s lie about the quality of his own thinking.

The Insult Is Not Feedback, It Is Method

We keep telling this story wrong. We tell it as if the theft happened and the insult was an unfortunate detail attached to it. The order is reversed. The insult came first, intended, calculated, and it came first because it had to.

Think about it: an idea cannot be moved while its author is still standing next to it. To steal a concept, to carry a proposal into a funding agency under your own name, you first need the person who built it to stop following it. You need him to not ask. You need him to not mention it at conferences. You need him to feel a small private embarrassment whenever the subject comes near, so that he changes the topic himself.

Shame does that work more cheaply than a lawyer ever could.

This is why the note said “disappointing” instead of saying nothing at all. Silence would have left the real author curious. Contempt sends him away and makes him grateful to be leaving. The devaluation is not cruelty added to the theft. The devaluation is the instrument of the theft.

“They do not take your idea. They take your standing to claim it, and then the idea follows them home.”

Typos Travel Where Conscience Does Not

My second friend sat once in a high level meeting about the future of higher education in a country. He presented a concept for a university that did not yet exist anywhere in that country, designed precisely for what that country would need. A senior figure in the room asked for the full proposal so it could be carried to “higher authorities” for approval.

My friend handed a full 64 page proposal over. A complete roadmap. An impressive work. After that, every message, call, communication attempt to that “senior figure” went unanswered.

A year later, a new university in that country was announced with a big advertising budget. That “senior figure” appeared among its founders. The concept was the concept my friend put together, and handed with trust to that senior figure. The architecture was the architecture. And in the polished official documents of this new institution, sat two small typographical errors, sitting exactly where they had sat in his original file.

My friend knew about these two small errors in his original files, but he got no time that day to correct them. They were still there, in the same places, in the new university public files. No one even cared to read or correct. The stealing was evident.

Theft always leaves fingerprints. What it rarely leaves is consequence. My friend knew. He could prove it. And there was nowhere to take the proof, because the institutions that would hear the complaint were the same institutions the thief now represented.

Institutions Reward the Signature, Not the Source

We call this a character problem. It is mostly a design problem wearing a character problem’s clothes.

Some funding agencies want a recognized name on the cover. Some ministries want a founder they can photograph. Boards want a single accountable figure, not a chain of contributors. Every system built around one visible signature creates a strong incentive to remove every other name from the page before the page is submitted. It also creates a strong incentive for some “leaders” to steal.

Then there is the older fear underneath it. An idea credited to a young person is not just an idea. It is evidence about who in the room is capable of thinking. Seniority in most institutions is a claim about intellectual authority, not a description of the calendar. When a thirty year old produces the best concept in the building, the hierarchy has to choose between updating itself and laundering the concept. Laundering is faster for some.

“You can measure what an institution truly fears by looking at whose name it forgets.”

Every Lasting Civilization Built Walls Against This

The remarkable thing is how many unrelated civilizations independently decided this was serious enough to build machinery around.

Islamic scholarship constructed an entire discipline for it. The isnad records the full chain of everyone who carried a statement before it reached you, and the science of ’ilm al-rijal produced biographical dictionaries evaluating hundreds of thousands of transmitters by name, birth, death, teachers, and reliability. This was built before printing presses existed. An enormous civilizational investment, made for the sole purpose of never losing track of who said it first.

Jewish tradition compressed the same conviction into a single line preserved in Pirkei Avot and in Megillah 15a: whoever reports a statement in the name of the one who said it brings redemption to the world. Not good manners. Redemption.

The modern academy built the footnote, and then built tenure, promotion, and reputation on top of it.

Three civilizations, arriving separately at the same conclusion. Knowledge that loses its origin becomes unreliable knowledge. Attribution is not politeness. Attribution is how a society keeps its thinking honest.

And still we fail at it constantly. Lise Meitner supplied the physical interpretation that explained nuclear fission, was nominated for a Nobel Prize forty eight times, and watched the 1944 Chemistry Prize go to Otto Hahn alone. An element carries her name now. The certificate never did.

The Real Loss Is the Next Idea

Every stolen proposal gets built. That is the strange mercy in these stories. The orphans project ran. The university opened. The work entered the world.

What did not enter the world is everything those two men would have brought forward afterward and never did. A person who is robbed once submits with caution. A person who is robbed and then told his work was worthless stops submitting altogether, and calls it wisdom.

Then the same institutions sit in strategy retreats asking why nobody brings them bold ideas anymore.

“The most expensive thing a leader ever steals is somebody’s willingness to try again.”

I have watched senior people agonize over how to appear visionary. The answer is embarrassingly cheap and permanently available. Say the name. Say it in the meeting where the person is not present. Say it to the funder, the minister, the board. Nothing you can steal will ever build you what one act of public attribution will.

Twenty five years is a long time to carry three lines from a man who knew they were false. Give people the truth about their work, and they will forgive you almost anything else.

Prof. Bassem Khafagy 05 August 2026

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Prof. Bassem Khafagy: An academic leader, best-seller author, award winning researcher, and strategic thinker whose work spans the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. He is currently dedicating his time to rethinking the “University” as a transformative force in society. Prof. Khafagy is the founding force behind several global academic initiatives, most notably the World Universities Foundation, WUF, World Summit on Universities, WSU, Antalya Global Foundation, AGF, and the Re-Imagine University Newsletter & book series.

The visual compositions throughout this newsletter and the series are original copyrighted works by Prof. Bassem K. Khafagy. They are crafted using advanced technological tools, including artificial intelligence, guided entirely by the writer’s artistic vision and design sensibility. In a series about being you, it felt only right that the art itself reflects that spirit of creative possibility. © All rights reserved, 2026.