Formula.Monks CEO Brady Brim-DeForest may not be a name you recognize, but his work is likely part of your everyday life. Brady (as he’s simply known) has been a technology trailblazer for nearly two decades, celebrated for pioneering agile development, lean product design, and autonomous teams at large-scale institutions. In other words, Brady gives Fortune 100 companies that are too big to move at innovation speeds, the tools and ability to transform the way they do business. So, if you own a smartwatch on an AT&T data plan; if you have uninterrupted power in your home; if you game on a Playstation or watch Hulu; if you shop at Walmart — it’s likely because of technology built by Brady’s global consultancy of technologists, engineers, and creatives. And those are just the projects he’s allowed to talk about.
“Consulting is often treated as a dirty word, but to me, it’s about being in service of others, helping our clients achieve their dreams, visions, goals,” Brady says. “For me, knowledge is such a powerful motivator, and our clients reveal their world to us— the good, the bad, and the ugly. So consulting is this cheat code to actually learning about the way the world actually works. It’s pure jet fuel for the ambitious learner.”
A pivotal turn in Brady’s journey came when he merged his company with Media.Monks, the industry-leading digital ad and marketing agency with 9,000 people across 32 countries and a staggering $1B+ in annual gross revenue. “The decision to merge with Media.Monks represented a critical juncture for us,” says Brady. That “us” he refers to being the nearly 800 global employees he brought with him, a fully remote workforce since 2007, his community of innovators. “It could either be a force multiplier or a death knell. What mattered to us, and what became the defining factor in our decision, was finding a shared cultural synergy.”
Today, Brady is the CEO of the newly launched Formula.Monks, the elite technology solutions consultancy within this industry titan, responsible for innovating the world’s most innovative brands. And that shared cultural synergy Brady explains as a people-first philosophy, which is how he built such a unified global collective of remote workers before remote work was even a real thing. “I’ve always believed that work is not a place you go, it’s a thing you do,” he says. “We are focused on outcomes, not output. We know that if we give our people the support and power to work autonomously, while providing a human-centric workplace, they will produce amazing things. That’s the culture I have always aimed to cultivate. With Media.Monks, we discovered not just alignment, but a resounding harmony. Their culture is about empowering people to do their best work by getting out of their way, that’s how you make change makers.”
Change-makers indeed. When the most innovative companies in the world need cutting-edge technology and business solutions, they call Formula.Monks. When an enterprise faces conflict, crisis, or the need for fast growth, they call Formula.Monks. When AI takes the world by storm, they call Formula.Monks. Why? Because they have the agility and expertise to deliver the kinds of rapid results McKinsey can only dream of. And if you ask Brady the secret to how they do this, his answer goes back to people.
“The culture we’ve created at Formula.Monks is one that celebrates quality, intellectual curiosity, rigor, passion, a sense of purpose and mission. If you meet the emotional needs of your people, they will work tirelessly to solve any problem. I believe in building an organization around people instead of trying to fit them into our organization. The return is so much greater.”
Some of those returns? Removing $1 billion in supply chain slack from Caterpillar; building an ISO-secure global outpost in LatAm for a US financial behemoth managing $295 billion in assets; inventing cutting-edge financial AI tools for Bloomberg to automate data across all 300+ global stock exchanges. But to Brady, these massive numbers mean less to him regarding EBITDA than they do a more human success metric: it means their solutions are making work better for his clients— consumers and employees alike.
“We’re all about making people’s lives better at work,” Brady says. “We’re specialists in building the future of business, meaning the infrastructure that powers the next generation of our clients’ enterprises. Every effort we make is geared towards making the lives of people doing the work more efficient, more effective, more enjoyable. It’s not just how we run our own business, but the business of our clients as well.”
AI is the new frontier, and Formula.Monks is leading the way. They’ve been delivering AI and Machine Learning (ML) tools to clients for years. Formula is also running what they call “Bot-camps” — workshops for C-suite and Senior Executives to level up their AI understanding and usage asap. And while there’s been much talk about jobs being lost to AI, Brady envisions an optimistic future where AI doesn’t replace people, but instead makes work a more human experience
“AI will not replace workers, but make us more efficient at the mundane busywork and allow us to focus our time on what we’re uniquely good at — looking across discrete areas of human knowledge and unleashing ingenuity, creativity, and our innovative potential,” Brady explains. “AI can sift through mundane tasks and free employees to focus on ‘deep work’, a state of distraction-free concentration.” With employees spending up to 60% of the workweek on digital communication tools like e-mail, slack, and teams—forcing non-meeting work to be done after-hours—the capacity for deep, concentrated work is dwindling just as it’s becoming increasingly vital. “Properly leveraged, AI can free us from the paradox of digital distraction,” Brady continues, “enabling more innovative ideas and breakthroughs.”
Brady Brim-DeForest and his team at Formula.Monks are revolutionizing work as we know it. They’re not just making enterprises more efficient, profitable, and on the cutting edge of technology; they’re ensuring the people within those enterprises thrive, and their work ripples out to positively impact our everyday lives. They’re creating a future where technology serves us, not the other way around. In the end, it’s not just about better business, but better lives. And that’s an innovation we can all get behind.
This story was originally published August 4, 2023, 8:00 PM.
