About Our Company
Leveraging the principles of the Kendo Way, we aim to challenge and overhaul antiquated practices in HR and business management. Our goal is to empower businesses to efficiently implement their strategic plans with the help of their teams. By doing so, we address two major challenges concurrently: modernising old-fashioned processes and aligning people strategy with business objectives.
Our Story
In 2018, a group of liked-minded individuals with extensive experience in organisational psychology, software development, HR management and business management decided to pool resources and created The Kendo Way as a vehicle to disrupt traditional and outdated procedures and approaches in HR.
We worked hard building Kendo, the people centred, enterprise SaaS platform that improves performance and employee experience at all levels in the organisation. In 2020 we launched an MVP of the product winning a major ASX listed public company. Product enhancements have continued as we got feedback from the user base.
In late 2021, we were recognised as the Editors choice of HR Tech APAC.
Our Purpose & Values
Our purpose is to empower organisations to so that they can achieve theirs. Kendo is an enabler that takes the plans that organisations have developed and turns them to reality.
This covers high level strategic plans, business plans, team plans and the career development plans of individuals. Organisations and people fail to implement a high proportion of the plans they so painstakingly prepare.
Failure to implement has many causes from poor execution at one extreme to people not having the capability to undertake what’s required, at the other.
The values required in addressing this range of underlying causes are central to our belief system and relate to our adoption of the Art of Kendo. Integrity, transparency, equality, respect, trust and ingenuity are all needed and these are the values that we are built on.
Philosophy of The Kendo Way
Kendo, which translates to the ‘way of the sword’, is a martial art form developed in Japan to develop swordsmanship which was an integral part of being becoming Samurai. The Samurai, and the Samurai feudal system, was how Japan operated as a nation and culture for more than 1,000 years and is still identifiable in Japanese society today. Samurai was a fundamental way of being that was most notably recognised through swordsmanship but being Samurai was to follow many important virtues. Kendo was the way that allowed a person to practice and improve and it was through the practice of Kendo that a person was able to develop their ability to live these virtues.
Our interest lies with how Kendo delivers a more profound and pervasive way of being that leads to a purposeful and powerful organisational culture. When the earthquake and tsunami struck the town of Fukushima in Japan in 2011 setting off a nuclear disaster, 200 people over the age of 60 volunteered to take the front line of the crisis. Why? The volunteers said the dangers of radiation should be faced by them, and not the young. This story highlights the understanding and importance of putting the good of others before one’s self. You cannot arrive at these outcomes through politics or planning. It comes from something deeply ingrained in people, in what they believed and how they behave as a result.
The Art of Kendo aims to mould the mind, body, and spirit. In The Kendo Way, this translates to moulding the individual, processes and procedures and culture to create an environment that inspires performance. As a martial art, Kendo is practised with groups of people wielding bamboo swords. The Kendo Way is focussed on teams within an organisation, wielding technology instead of swords, working collaboratively to achieve the organisations’ purpose and objectives.