In other words, they do not have another choice than to protect themselves with the agreements. Two relevant examples best revealing the necessity for NDA include:

In 2006, a trio of Coca Cola Company employees approached PepsiCo to sell them the secret recipe for the Coke drink. The threat never materialized as PepsiCo was fair and exposed the plot (Bone, 2006)

An employee at accounting and financial consulting firm SOA Projects stole company information -- client data, trade secrets, confidential data and other proprietary information -- and is now using it at his new job, within a rival company (Trade Secrets Blog, 2010).

As for the personal choice of this individual, it is that of asking the employees and the business partners to sign non-disclosure agreements. The rationale behind this decision is given by the following:

Talking to employees or other parties about a new product could leak information to the competition,...

n, which would itself manufacture and retail a similar product
The lack of NDAs would make it easy for employees or other parties to disclose to the company's competition the various product features, such as benefits, recipe, production mechanisms and so on; this would lead to the loss of the competitive advantage of differentiation

The lack of confidentiality agreements would make it more likely for the core of competitive strategies to reach the competition and as such damage the entire strategic efforts.