People tend to fall in love with their own ideas… even dumb people with dumb ideas (especially dumb people with dumb ideas).
Of course, it actually makes sense if you consider that everyone has their own unique worldview and that our ideas will be consistent with our particular worldview. Prominent behavioural economist Dan Ariely refers to this as an idiosyncratic fit.
Basically, our ideas inherently accommodate our own idiosyncrasies and therefore we tend to prefer them over the ideas of others that don’t accommodate our particular idiosyncrasies.
For example, a friend of mine owns a health club in a smallish rural town. He was a previous state bodybuilding champion (about a decade ago) and his wife was also a reasonably successful regional bodybuilder and so, perhaps not too surprisingly, his website has images of himself and his wife in their “bodybuilding” prime.
The problem, for me, is that this is a small town without a big “bodybuilding” population and typical hardcore bodybuilding images can be intimidating to non-bodybuilders. Obviously, the concern is that people visiting the website will see these images and form the view that they aren’t a good fit for the club.
Dr Ariely, in a number of experiments, demonstrated that the Not Invented Here bias actually extends beyond idiosyncratic fit… it turns out that we love our own ideas simply because they are ours.
Of course, no matter how big or successful we are no one (person or company) has a monopoly on good ideas… witness the failure of Microsoft’s Zune, Apple’s Newton, and Tower Records.
It’s natural for owners and managers to want to run their businesses in a way that is consistent with their own worldview… just leave room for the possibility that “your ideas” might be hindering, not helping, your business.
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