"opening the kimono" (1979?, 1984)

[Benjamin Zimmer]

Thursday's "Dilbert" strip has Dogbert committing "consult and blabbery":

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http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20050616.html
"Incentivize the resources to grown their bandwidth to your end-state
vision. Don't open the kimono until you ping the change agent for a brain
dump and drill down to your core competencies."
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Coincidentally, Josh Fruhlinger on "The Comics Curmudgeon" site recently
mentioned the bizarre phrase "opening the kimono":

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http://joshreads.com/index.php?p=342
Back at the turn of the century, when I was working at a doomed San
Francisco dot-com, our CEO used to say that everything was about "dollars
and eyeballs." Our job, as he put it, was to "monetize eyeballs." (He also
referred to revealing our troubled financial situation to potential
investors as "opening the kimono," but that’s a traumatic story for a
different time.)
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Here's a definition from "The Microsoft Lexicon" (see also Susie Dent's
_The Language Report_ and Wordspy.com):

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http://www.cinepad.com/mslex_2.htm
Open The Kimono: A marvelous phrase of non-Microsoft origin, probably
stemming from the rash of Japanese acquisitions of American enterprises in
the '80s, that has been adopted into the Microspeak marketing lexicon.
Basically a somewhat sexist synonym for "open the books," it means to
reveal the inner workings of a project or company to a prospective new
partner.
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The earliest cite I've found is from 1984 (via ProQuest):

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http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=1279765&sid=1&Fmt=2&clientId=1564&RQT=309&VName=PQD
_PR Casebook_, Feb/Mar 1984, p. 14
"Opening the Kimono" in New Business Presentations
The phrase "opening the kimono" can mean 2 things in the context of public
relations (PR). It can mean being straightforward in client and media
relations, and it also applies to the issue of how far an agency should go
in new business presentations. The agency should have a sense of
responsibility to its clients during the time when the new business
presentation is being conceived. The agency should be particularly careful
not to open the kimono too far and make inflated promises leading to
inflated expectations, misunderstandings, disappointments, and a jaded
view of PR.
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In Paul Freiberger's 1984 book _Fire in the Valley: The Making of The
Personal Computer_, Steve Jobs recalls using the phrase in a 1979 meeting:

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http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0071358927/?v=search-inside&keywords=kimono
"I went down to Xerox Development Corporation," Jobs said, "which made all
of Xerox's venture investments, and I said, 'Look. I will let you invest a
million dollars in Apple if you will sort of open the kimono at Xerox
PARC.'"
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But according to one site <http://buzzkiller.net/openthekimono.html> the
expression may date all the way back to the late '60s.


--Ben Zimmer