Brand Velocity's Knowledge-Worker Innovation

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If they spend less, they keep the difference as part of their income. (One can't help but wonder whether Merrill Lynch's John Thain would have purchased a $1,400 trash can under such circumstances.) Besides reducing paperwork—at Brand Velocity, you file only four expense reports a year—the point is to give workers exactly the tools they need to do their jobs. You perform best on a PC, but I prefer a Mac (AAPL)? No problem. We each get what we want, and the company doesn't find itself struggling (and paying a fortune) to standardize everything.

Brand Velocity offers employees a base salary. But much of their remuneration is determined by a points system, with points awarded for three—and only three—things: selling great work, delivering great work, and recruiting and developing great talent. Under this arrangement, says Bergstrand, "highly productive knowledge workers don't need to be a partner to be compensated like one. At the same time, the most senior people aren't guaranteed the highest compensation." This is more than a theory. Though he's the CEO, Bergstrand himself often doesn't make the most dough.

If this all seems a little freewheeling, it's not. Bergstrand and his team are rigorous in the way do most everything, including reaching decisions. On any given project, they solicit lots of input throughout the organization but leave no doubt who the final decision-maker is. That person then acts—and acts quickly.

"The pursuit of consensus becomes the Anaconda snake of large enterprises," Bergstrand maintains. "The Anaconda doesn't bite. It kills its prey through suffocation."

The bottom line: Brand Velocity is profitable and growing. It claims that its costs run 20% less than the industry average. And most notably, it says it delivers to clients the same high-quality results they would get from much larger consulting firms—but in half the time and with less than half the manpower, resulting in huge customer savings.

The real question is how big Brand Velocity can get. It's one thing to do this at the firm's current size and quite another to pull this off with a staff of thousands.

Bergstrand says that, having generated about $15 million in business to this point, Brand Velocity is ready now to move beyond the "prototype" stage. He has hired top executives from major corporations—Kimberly-Clark (KMP) and Ernst & Young, among them—so that as Brand Velocity has tested various knowledge-worker productivity concepts, "we could factor in the need for scalability."

The effort certainly bears watching. If Brand Velocity thrives—and teaches others along the way—the implications could be nothing short of revolutionary.

To see a full-length video of Jack Bergstrand in conversation with Rick Wartzman, click here.

Rick Wartzman is the executive director of the Drucker Institute at Claremont Graduate University.

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