Passion works here
La vida robot How four underdogs from the mean streets of Phoenix took on the best from M.I.T. in the national underwater bot championship. inspired me. It shows how college kids built an underwater robot with passion, ingenuity, the courage to ask for help and an 800 dollar budget.
What Juergen Ahting writes here is connected:
So the next time a manager tells us e.g. “Yes we should do that, but we haven’t got the right people / enough resources / … to succeed.” we should test him by asking “And what are you going to do about that?”.
In my experience, with a big budget it is hard to get things done. The team is overstaffed, and the incentive to set priorities is low. When I hear someone complaing about lack of budget, I am happy – I see an opportunity to do what matters most.
I’m working with Nynke Fokma on some budgetless websites right now. It’s fun, useful and goes way faster than a fully funded CMS project I was on. We are working from passion instead of a budget.
So, next time a manager tells us “This project is fully funded”, we could test them by asking: “What would you do if you had one tenth of the budget?”
