I don't know who first said, "Let's not reinvent the wheel," but the wheel is a pretty old thing. So for millennia, we as a society decided to move forward with the wheel, redefining the details, but never really altering that which works quite well. Sometime after the industrial revolution, when emphasis was drawn to reducing costs via mass production, the phrase earned an entirely new life. Employees that reinvented the wheel were wasting precious time that could be spent producing more product that could be shipped to more homes. In other words, keep your head down so that profits can stay up.