Anyone who’s been around the tech industry for any length of time knows what these three words, and their acronym, NIH, mean. To summarize, NIH refers to the organizational malady one observes in many project leaders and others in positions of control who frown upon, and frequently seek to crush, all ideas, projects and products not initiated by them. Often, if you want your idea adopted by someone with a severe case of NIH, you have to essentially make it their idea – you basically let the NIHer “steal” the idea. Yeah – you know what I’m talking about, ‘cuz just like me, you’ve done it – played doormat for the greater good, because it was more important to you to get the idea adopted than to get the credit.

As technologists (as undoubtedly you are if you’re reading this blog) let us pose this question: Where does NIH come from? What causes people to become so singularly and doggedly focused on promoting their own pet projects and agendas that they will subjugate the greater good – however measured – to their own selfish interests? I submit for your consideration (and hopefully debate) that NIH stems from, and is part and parcel of, the culture of secrecy that pervades so many technology companies.

Give the Gift of Good Karma

I had the pleasure of participating recently in a conference call discussion on the topic of consumer experience with several leading thinkers from the Open Source, New Media and Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMORPG) communities, the purpose of which was to begin a conversation around how and why community-driven, or at least community-inclusive, products and projects seem to deliver superior results. The President of MMORPG company eGenesis offered an interesting thought about how communities’ basic ground rules – like secrecy or openness – influence culture and behavior. He described his recent experience at burning man, and specifically its gift economy, where strangers give strangers gifts, and how this fostered a very welcoming and relaxed atmosphere. This experience led him to conduct a thought experiment: what if, rather than a gift economy, this gathering were based instead on a theft economy, where the ground rules were, if you succeed in stealing other people’s stuff without getting caught, you get to keep the loot. This would lead, he postulated (and I agree) to an environment of secrecy, suspicion, hoarding and deceit. OK – so you’d be forgiven if right now you’re asking yourself “what the hell does this have to do with systems management?” bear with me.

Stop and think for a second about the lengths to which most large software companies go to try to prevent their code from being copied and their license terms from being breached. And consider further the sheer amount of collective money and energy that these companies and their customers spend on lawyers and lawsuits, auditors and audits, and compliance officers and compliance. I’d say that today’s proprietary software world is pretty darned close to the the anti-burning man theft economy dystopia envisioned by Andy.

If one were unlucky enough to be living in such a world, it’s logical to expect that NIH would be epidemic and acute. Because when you create a culture of secrecy and distrust, it is only natural for people to look out exclusively for their own narrow interests. Over time, those who steal and hoard well would get richer and more powerful, and most others would be scraping by at best. Think contemporary Rio – Think computer industry of the 1990s.

And when communities spawn a culture where NIH is rampant, and collaboration scarce, they produce inferior results. Think IE. Such communities produce inferior results because, over the short term, many good ideas never see the light of day, and over the medium to long term, because good people self select out of these environments.

Not Invented Here

Now consider the meaning of these three words in the context of Open Source. Perhaps better than any other three words I can think of, they convey the power and culture of Open Source. In this context, Not Invented Here means openness, inclusiveness, collaboration, debate, meritocracy – the best idea wins regardless of its source.

For producers and users (or prosumers to borrow a term from the book Wikinomics) of Open Source, Not Invented Here means faster product innovation through user and solution provider code contributions; Not Invented Here means greater utility for Open Source users because the product is, at least in part, invented by them; and Not Invented Here means lower R&D, sales and marketing costs for the Open Source company, which translate into lower acquisition and ownership costs for their customers. In Open Source, Not Invented Here is a beautiful thing.

To summarize, ground rules determine culture, culture determines behavior and behavior determines outcomes. Openness leads to collaboration and trust, collaboration and trust lead to meritocracy and meritocracy leads to better results. In contrast, secrecy and being closed leads to NIH and hoarding, NIH and hoarding lead to autocracy or oligarchy, and to inferior results.

I live with my family in Raleigh, North Carolina (a seemingly random fact, the relevance of which will become apparent in a sec). My wife teaches ballet to children, and so she’s always good for a couple funny kid stories each week to lighten me up. One day, she brought home a particularly funny, and as it turns out, very relevant story. At the start of each class when she takes roll, she likes to ask her kids a question to get them engaged. One day she asked what their parents do for a living, to which one little girl replied “My daddy works at Red Hat – they saved the computer business.” When my wife first told me this, I thought it was an absolute riot, and I also thought it was more than a little presumptuous of that little girl’s daddy. The more time I spend around Open Source, though, the more I think her daddy was right.