Jon Stojan
Los Angeles has always been a city of innovators. Of change makers. From media and entertainment to social issues and technology, we’ve driven progress, taken risks, and led the way defining global culture. So, when Brady Brim-DeForest, author of the bestselling book Smaller is Better: Using Small Autonomous Teams to Drive the Future of Enterprise and CEO of Formula.Monks, set out to build the next generation technology consulting firm, he knew exactly where he wanted it to be: right here in the City of Angels.
“We founded Formula.Monks in 2007 in LA, and we’re still headquartered here. Even though we’re now part of the global 8,000-person strong Monks, Los Angeles has remained our spiritual center for almost twenty years.”
Right from the start, Brim-DeForest and his team had a vision of doing technology consulting differently. Unlike the Accentures of the world, they wanted to bring a startup mindset to the work they were doing for large-scale enterprises. “Our vision required a particular way of thinking about the world. We wanted to help enterprises innovate like startups, and more than anywhere else in the world, LA was where we could find top-tier talent, who thought differently about how to design and build software within the enterprise.”
From Formula.Monks’ earliest days, it brought a unique perspective to the table. “We recognized that the traditional enterprise way of working stifled out-of-the-box, entrepreneurial thinking,” Brim-DeForest said. “We knew that we could provide an alternative to the traditional options large-scale organizations had to drive innovation. We could inject a bit of their own entrepreneurial origin story back into them.” It’s a way of thinking about their work that they’ve carried with them ever since.
Before Formula.Monks and Brady Brim-DeForest, most enterprises only had access to traditional IT service providers like Cognizant, internal IT departments, or one of the “Big Five” consulting firms. But whether they outsourced to a big firm or used internal IT resources, there was often a problem: their teams got stuck operating in the same models that made it difficult for them to compete with smaller, more nimble competitors.
“Enterprises often found themselves a day late and a dollar short when it came to out-innovating the startups nipping at their heels,” Brim-DeForest explained. “At the same time, they couldn’t attract the density of quality talent they needed to effectively compete, because the talent was attracted to the speed and autonomy that comes with working in a startup environment.”
Since their early days, Formula.Monks focused on attracting talent by offering a unique experience — access to the scale and complexity of the challenges offered by their enterprise clientele, but within an environment that catered to the needs and aspirations of the next generation of engineering, product, and design talent.
Like so many other things that make LA great, Formula.Monks lives by its own principles. When Silicon Valley started to see the value in the approach Brim-DeForest and his team had been taking for years, the company didn’t rest on its laurels. Instead, they used the same tools and approaches they leverage on behalf of their clients to adapt and reinvent themselves. “Just like I teach organizations to do in Smaller is Better, we continually focus on our own transformation,” Brim-DeForest explained. “We still provide our core product and technology innovation services, but we’ve also built out alternatives up the value chain into the traditional management consulting space. That enables us to compete head-to-head with firms like McKinsey, especially because our consulting offering takes the same approach as our other services—namely a strong bias towards action, high-velocity, and cross vertical thinking.”
“If you compare our teams to the legacy players, you’ll see that despite our competitors’ phenomenal depth of talent, they stop at the slide deck or the financial model,” Brim-DeForest said. “That’s the outcome. It’s strategy without implementation. At Formula.Monks, we’re all about driving strategy, but we take action, too. That’s a disruptive approach, and it enables enterprises to go from zero all the way to done with a single partner. That means they can avoid the downside risk inherent in managing multiple discreet partners where gaps in knowledge transfer can doom critical investments before they ever get to launch.”
This kind of innovation and disruption is quintessential LA—and quintessential Formula.Monks. “We’re always trying to skate to where the puck is going,” Brim-DeForest said. “This is especially true now, when the very nature of computing is changing. We’re rapidly moving towards a world where AI will accelerate a fundamental shift in the way we interact with the compute layer. Interfaces are going to fundamentally change. People won’t spend nearly as much time as they do today clicking a mouse and typing on a keyboard while sitting in front of a computer screen. We’re going to be consuming data and interacting through artificial intelligence in a way that completely changes our current paradigm. That’s where we’re headed, and that knowledge is driving our growth strategy. It’s driving the opportunities we’re taking on…opportunities to help our clients really reimagine the fundamentals of their business.”
For Brim-DeForest, seeing the way most technology consulting firms are approaching the massive changes looming on the horizon is reminiscent of how those firms have handled so many other massive changes over the years. Most of them look at AI as a way to enhance the systems, tools, and services they already sell. But as part of his goal to stay true to the culture of innovation that defines Formula.Monks—and the city it still calls home—Brim-DeForest is taking a different approach. “We know that AI is going to fundamentally disrupt the way businesses are organized and operate. So now, more than ever, enterprises need to undergo a similar fundamental shift. And they’ll need to do so on a deeper level than almost anyone seems to realize. Enterprise infrastructure, IT organizations, and software engineering as we know them are going the way of the dodo bird.”
That’s where Formula.Monks comes in. After spending almost twenty years honing their ability to think and do differently, they are uniquely positioned to guide their clients through the changes that are coming, and coming fast. With their laser focus on small, nimble teams that can innovate and move quickly, they can stay one step ahead—and inspire their clients to do the same.
As effective as this approach is, it’s not one that enterprise organizations on the whole always understand, let alone embrace—at least not at first. But Brim-DeForest and his team are there to lead the way. “We get it: most enterprises are allergic to risk, and this way of operating can feel too risky for them,” he said. “That’s why we help these big organizations understand that what we’re asking them to do comes down to first principles thinking, which is ultimately about questioning traditional dogma. It’s so easy for any of us to fall into the trap of looking around the room, seeing everyone else doing something a certain way, and thinking that’s the only way it can or should be done. We get our clients out of that trap by helping them learn to question everything.”
As far as Brim-DeForest and Formula.Monks are concerned, the very fabric of the world we inhabit is built on what came before…but, he emphasized, what came before is arbitrary. It’s based on the decisions, knowledge, and constraints of prior generations. Practicing first principles reasoning is how Formula.Monks sidesteps all the constraints that shackled those previous ways of thinking. And, it’s how they help their clients think through the what ifs and the whys, until eventually they come to realize that most of the constraints they think exist are completely artificial—and that it’s not only possible to find ways around them, but there is tremendous upside in doing so.
Of course, it’s not always smooth sailing. Most organizations have resistance to change built into their core DNA. Their investment cycles in particular are almost always focused on delivering predictable outcomes. But as Brim-DeForest pointed out, many of them are desperate for a new approach. “They can sense, as they look at the world around them, that their tried-and-true ways of doing things don’t work as well as they once did. But creative destruction is a scary thing. It involves breaking things, destabilizing things. It takes a tremendous amount of effort. And, it flies in the face of what most enterprises have focused on for their entire existence: optimizing to remove risk.”
“Every time we work with a new client, wherever they’re located in the world, we take them back to the same idea we started with in Los Angeles twenty years ago: that enabling talent to actually innovate is the key,” he said. “This requires the organization to embrace failure as the necessary precursor to success. We remind them that if they continue to optimize to remove risk, they are in effect hamstringing their ability to create significant upside. To get the results they want—the results they need to continue to thrive, not just survive—they have to optimize for success, not optimize to eliminate failure.”
Every day, Brim-DeForest and his team at Formula.Monks see this play out in the organizations they support. They see the complex systems these organizations have built to attempt to eliminate risk. And, they see the incredible burdens these systems carry, not just the cost of the risk mitigation infrastructure itself, but also the impact on progress. They know that, if allowed to continue down that road, their clients will one day wake up and find themselves disconnected from what made them great in the first place. So, they work to build a culture that rewards the activity that generates upside: taking risks.
Like Los Angeles institutions have always done, Formula.Monks holds a mirror up to the world around it. They know the systems of hierarchy in most organizations don’t support radical candor, or transparency, or autonomy. But they don’t let that stop them from catalyzing change. It’s a high-risk approach, but just ask their clients: it works. They’ve consulted for some of the largest and most innovative companies in the world—companies like Google, Microsoft, Caterpillar, Meta, Morningstar, and dozens of others. And in each instance, they’ve managed to help those companies scale, modernize, and get back to the roots of what made them great in the first place.
“Just like we did, once our clients embrace the idea of using small, autonomous teams at scale, they get addicted,” Brim-DeForest said. “Suddenly, they’re building and innovating in ways that connect them with their entrepreneurial past. They’re creating new products, building new lines of business, and making real measurable progress towards their goals. They get so much done so quickly and start accomplishing things they didn’t really think their organization could ever accomplish again. It creates a flywheel effect where they spin this way of working out into little pockets across the organization. Decision-making gets pushed out to the edges, instead of command and control centralized at the center.”
It’s not easy, and it’s not cookie-cutter, but that’s never been what Brim-DeForest and his team have cared about. Instead, they’re focused on continually reinventing their approach in order to stay out in front of the pack — helping their clients do the same. Whatever it takes to get that done, they do, whether it’s offering training and enablement services to help their clients embrace this new way of doing things, or designing new strategies and systems that prioritize and reward innovation and results. This is what has kept them at the forefront of the technology consulting industry since 2007. It’s what has enabled them to grow into a global company with thousands of employees and a presence in forty-two countries. And it’s what will ensure this LA company will continue to adapt and thrive for decades to come.