Fabio Akita wants Brazilian businesses to fail. Really.

The Ruby on Rails evangelist and apostle of agile management also thinks that while nine out of 10 Brazilian startups will probably fail, this is good for business overall.  The quicker flaws are exposed, the sooner people can go about fixing them. “Having no problems is a problem,” Akita said. “You can’t improve if you assume you are not making mistakes.”

On a blissful evening in the depths of *cough* winter, we met at a lively cafe on Paulista Ave, to discuss the language and lifestyle of Ruby on Rails programming, as well as what barriers must be broken for Brazilian companies to take their place on the world stage. Besides the typical culprit, stifling bureaucracy and its attendant cronyism, inefficiency and top-down management, Akita said Brazilians have been programmed not to take risks. In spite of the pitfalls, entrepreneurs just think differently. “If they are entrepreneurs, they will try anything to make their dreams come true,” said Akita.

Fabio Akita is the author of the first book on Rails created for a Brazilian audience and a product manager at Locaweb – the largest web hosting company in Brazil, with the mission to make Rails ubiquitous in the Latin American open source community, according to his profile on Working With Rails.

Ruby on Rails is a programming language made popular in Brazil only in the past three or so years and Akita was one of its first proponents as early as 2006. While Rails enthusiasts don’t see the language going mainstream, like Java or C++, it is flexible and egalitarian due to fact it is an open source language. In October of 2008, the first Brazilian Rails Summit was held in Sao Paulo, with 21 speakers and over 550 attendees. The next Rails Summit, which is scheduled for Oct. 1 3-14, 2009, is expected to draw as many as 700 attendees.

Said Tim O’Reilly, the founder of O’Reilly Media.“Ruby on Rails is a breakthrough in lowering the barriers of entry to programming.Powerful web applications that formerly might have taken weeks or months to develop can be produced in a matter of days,”  Importantly, Rails is a flexible, lightweight language that allows a few programmers to do the work of many. Akita said that “coders” are like commercial painters who paint a wall, while Ruby programmers craft works of art with special brushes and techniques.

Although he evangelizes Rails at conferences and within the maverick units of major corporations, Akita said he gained credibility by not imposing the language on his employees at Locaweb. At his job, Akita said a conflict arose with a team who would not take orders from their manager. Subsequently the manager was “taken off” and the the team was told to elect their own manager. Far stumbling upon a secret formula for success, Akita and his team have just stumbled as a result. Said Akita, “it was a total disaster in the beginning,” but he also said he is committed to seeing the experiment through. Allowing his team to live with the ramifications of their decision is all part of his management philosophy. In the end, he hopes their buy-in will make them more committed to the process and the results.

Akita would hardly describe himself as an optimist, but his decision to drop out of the computer science program at University of Sao Paulo was a prescient move. While his parents grappled with his decision to leave school and bounce from job to job, once working for three different companies in a single year, Akita long ago silenced the skeptics. Said Akita, “doing what everyone else is doing is the biggest risk.”