Why I Never Sign Non-Disclosure Agreements

It wasn’t the first time it happened to me.

He was tall. Well-dressed. Good looking. He had waited until the little crowd of people I had been talking to dispersed.

He took a copy of Ready, Fire, Aim out of the satchel he was carrying and asked me to sign it. As I was doing so, he asked if I could answer some questions he had about his plan to launch an AI-related business.

“Sure,” I said.

“I think you’re really going to like it,” he said. And then he reached into his satchel again and pulled out some sort of document.

“But I have to ask you to sign this non-disclosure agreement before I tell you the details.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, smiling. “I can’t do that.”

“Why?” he said. He looked genuinely surprised.

“I don’t sign NDAs,” I said.

He stared at me in disbelief for a long moment, as if he expected me to break out laughing and say, “Just kidding!” When he realized I was serious, he frowned and walked away. As he passed a trash basket, I was half expecting him to toss my book into it.

Here’s the thing:

Great ideas – and especially great business, academic, and artistic ideas – do not spring to life like Dionysus from Zeus’s thigh. They arrive in a much less dramatic fashion. They come to being gradually. You might say they “evolve,” because it happens through a communal process that is akin to natural selection.

They begin, like all innovations, as a result of friction. In business, it is usually the friction between the profit motive and something that impedes it. And because great business ideas develop to solve problems common to an industry or within a market, there is never just one person trying to solve them. Depending on the size of the industry/ marketplace, there are dozens, or hundreds, or even thousands.

And that is why Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point is must reading for anyone that wants to start or help grow a business. It explains (as I note in my review of the book, below) how great ideas seem to spring into being. They are not – in fact, they are never – completely new. They are minor but important variations on ideas that many smart people have been thinking about and working on.

Which is why, as I explained in my answer to a reader’s question about NDAs in the April 15 issue, NDAs related to “great” new business ideas make so sense… and why I never sign them. It’s not because I don’t want to be influenced by someone else’s idea. It’s because I realize it’s quite possible that it’s an idea I’m already working on myself!