Here’s the thing. I am really good at what I do. That puts demands on my time, but a “big company” isn’t what you need. When I try to follow the normal business growth curve and replace myself with a manager or CEO of some kind, the magic slips away. I start hearing myself use words like “elasticity” and “resource”, and phrases like “customer satisfaction” and “cross-functional teams”. I have an MBA and it starts to show.
It’s faceless. I hate that. And it’s bad for you.
You have a micro-startup. No big budgets or funding. Just you and your idea. This experience should be about you, your idea, and me. It should be about pealing back all the artifice and getting at what really matters. It should be about giving you a small team that fits your size and vision. It should be about surrounding yourself with people who think and feel the way you do. People who are excited about your ideas and vision. That’s what you will find here.
For me, it’s also about not wanting to work on one more dead end project, or seeing one more person fail to achieve. It’s a little bit about “agile”, and those of you familiar with the Agile movement will see some parallels to my philosophy. But the Agilists went too far. It turned into a religion, and now people are doing things just because it’s Agile and not because it makes sense.
What I do – let’s call it Benkido – is about pragmatism. It’s a way of thinking that models life. I love not knowing the future and I approach every problem with that mindset. I look at a situation and seek out the easiest, least risky approach to prove or disprove your ideas. I get you into the marketplace early so you can get feedback from the people who really want to pay. I have a way for you to start driving without having to wait for all the lights to turn green (thanks, Rich Dad). Doesn’t that make sense to you?
Benkido is the anti-process process. I’ve tried every platform and methodology. They provide answers, but not wisdom. I say down with frameworks, down with technology, down with buzzwords, down with big design specs. Down with complexity. Down with anything that stands between you and the next step to your dream. (Down with me if I’m standing in your way). It’s about how quickly the world changes. It’s about an approach to software design that can change as fast as the ideas do.
Benkido says one thing that must rise above all else: your ability to adapt. Survival doesn’t go to the fittest, but the most able to adapt. Benkido is about checking for the integrity of that idea at each step of the way.
You don’t need to have crashed and burned on a few projects to know my words are true. But it helps. After you fail and become disillusioned like I have many times, you begin to ask what life is really about. You get away from the notion of perfection and you are attracted to incremental progress and step by step improvement. I believe that today. There is no big bang waiting for you. Only measured, careful success step by step. Little changes. Little progress. It adds up.
Benkido is about you and me doing something amazing together, one step at a time. When I try to take the “me” out of this site, it destroys what is perhaps the most important point of the philosophy: success is shared between people not companies.
So there you go. My anti-manifesto manifesto. A true-blue account of what you and your project mean to me.