Brand Velocity – The Project Acceleration Company

News Articles


		It's Time to Reinvent Reinvention While working on more than $2 billion worth of reinvention projects in the past 15 years, I've often reflected on why large companies can be so good at running their organizations but struggle so much when it comes to changing them. Anyway you slice it, reinvention is hard. It is difficult even when it's successful. And it hurts when projects stumble, spiral out of control and burn—which happens as much as 70 percent of the time. Click for more

		How CIOs Can Build a Better Brand In today's rapidly changing global marketplace, brand preference is critical to success. Brand preference-being preferred by a buyer over all other alternatives-is the true source of sustainable brand value. Some brands, like Coca-Cola, have achieved this for more than a century, but brand value isn't an entitlement. It has to be continually earned through sustainable competitive advantage. Click for more

		Finding the Right Road to Successful Innovation A key insight from successful innovators is that their innovations are never wacky ideas. Innovations that work derive from a clear insight about a problem that needs solving, and they're linked to a strong implementation capability. Click for more

		Should CIOs have a foreign policy? Another reason for this exercise is for you to learn which systems are most essential to keeping the company running -- and they may not be the most complex or challenging ones from IT's point of view. "Generally, anything around your revenue stream is highly critical," says Terry Assink, group vice president for Brand Velocity, which consults on business project implementations, and former CIO of Kimberly-Clark. "You need to be able to take in money, and you need to be able to pay your employees." Click for more

		Turn Enterprise Risk Management Into a Value Driver Enterprise Risk Management (ERM) is a foundational mechanism for boards and executive teams to assess and govern their corporate risks. Unfortunately, these efforts too often become expensive compliance exercises, with insufficient emphasis on enterprise value creation. Given the pace of change in the global marketplace, many companies could benefit from rethinking ERM through a Value Risk Management lens... Click for more

		Trust Yourself to Be a Leader When I researched executive leadership as a doctoral student at George Washington University, I concluded that many highly educated people have systematically had their intuitive leadership abilities trained out of them. We have been repeatedly tested and certified for the proverbial trees instead of the forest. We spend our careers getting paid to be good individual specialists. Click for more


		Disaster Averted? "Audit shouldn't be the default simply because risk management doesn't seem to fit the other committees," say Jack Bergstrand. "Depending on the type of organization, you need an oversight committee that can address the breadth of key risks to the enterprise, someone with IT expertise to look at IT risks, or someone with marketing expertise to look at market risks..." Click for more

		Disaster Averted? "Audit shouldn't be the default simply because risk management doesn't seem to fit the other committees," say Jack Bergstrand. "Depending on the type of organization, you need an oversight committee that can address the breadth of key risks to the enterprise, someone with IT expertise to look at IT risks, or someone with marketing expertise to look at market risks..." Click for more

		Enterprise Software improving the way you do business Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity, Inc. helps to improve and accelerate large reinvention initiatives, which is also linked to his latest book, Reinvent Your Enterprise. The book helps readers reinvent their enterprises, which also allows reinvention with their society. Bergstrand also has a specialty in knowledge work productivity management. Click for more

		America's Best CFOs We had a chance to also speak with Jack Bergstrand, who was the former CFO of Coca-Cola Beverages and now is the CEO of Brand Velocity. Bergstrand was also CIO of The Coca-Cola Company and helped to work with the management team when the company’s stock increased from $3 to $22. Click for more

		IT vs. Business: Who Should You Blame When Projects Fail? According to William Hartman, managing director, Brand Velocity, a firm that specializes in “project acceleration,” problems with technology projects are almost never technology problems ... they are invariably business ones. Hartman has been on both sides of the business-IT divide, previously serving as CIO for Coca-Cola Enterprises and as CEO of Ernst & Young’s Global Client Consulting practice for the Americas, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Click for more

		Why New Technology Demands New Business Models The future of our national and corporate competitiveness depends upon our ability to innovate. And the call for innovation tied to new technologies has not been this intense since the late 1990s, when the dotcom revolution exploded. Unfortunately, many CIOs are not participating strategically or systematically enough in innovation. Because of this, many companies falter despite having access to an avalanche of ideas from almost every department. Click for more

		The Importance of Role Models for Entrepreneurs Every business owner has been inspired by someone in their life, whether it’s a leadership titan or a family member. Here, five entrepreneurs—including Jack Bergstrand—reveal their number one role model in business and the insight that led to a bottom-line benefit. Click for more

		Boosting IT Worker Productivity Brand Velocity, a company that specializes in helping companies implement IT initiatives, urges its top-level employees to learn how to communicate in ways that facilitate effective collaboration among team members. One such example, says Brand Velocity CEO Jack Bergstrand, “is to [articulate] a clear enterprise model to make sure people are seeing a project in the same way.” Click for more

		How failure is built into many large projects Many, if not most, of the big “reinvention” projects that large organizations undertake fail, and they fail because they were designed to fail, according to Jack Bergstrand, former CIO of The Coca-Cola Co. and founder of Brand Velocity. The problem begins with management methods that were created for the industrial age, which fail to consider complex human factors in large, dynamic organizations. Click for more

		Is It the Weekend Yet? “The fact that things are so segmented in large companies but yet the work is so interdependent creates a lot of organizational noise, and that organizational noise sucks up a lot of hours,” says Bergstrand, author of Reinvent Your Enterprise. “And those are the hours that are the difference between the thirty hours a week that The Wall Street Journal predicted and the sixty or seventy hours that are the reality now.” Click for more

		Why Projects are Designed to Fail and How to Make Them Succeed Implementing reinvention projects is critical for companies to win in the global marketplace. Unfortunately, project failures have consistently been a major barrier to reinvention. According to Standish Research, 70% of major projects fail to meet their objectives; 50% exceed their original cost estimates by a whopping 200%; and 20% are ultimately cancelled. Why is this? Companies and their consulting partners have been working on large enterprise projects for many decades, and yet the numbers haven’t improved. Click for more

		Four Questions to Ask for Successful System Integration You want to save money on systems integration and beat the odds of failing after a restructuring or merger and acquisition? Then you need to answer four questions, and make sure when you answer them, everyone's actually on the same page, suggests Jack Bergstrand, the CEO of consulting firm Brand Velocity, in a recent IndustryWeek article. Click for more

		Peter Drucker and IT Project Management Peter Drucker was the most influential management thinker of the 20th Century for good reason and those reasons have become even clearer in 2010. Drucker consistently pointed out the need for business leaders to reinvent their enterprises by systematically improving their knowledge work (organizational) productivity. Click for more

		Drawing the Lines on System Integration Bergstrand, who served as CIO for The Coca-Cola Company, says he sees many companies fall into the trap of thinking there’s a definitive line of organization that will be established, only to discover during implementation there are many more questions to be answered. Click for more

		Enterprise Reinvention: How to Improve Corporate Performance through Enterprise Risk Management Enterprise reinvention and enterprise risk management have been a challenge to implement in many large organizations. The key to unlocking the potential of both is to understand and overcome why the traditional implementation approach consistently struggles. Click for more

		Consultants on Consulting: How to Make the Switch Failing to define your services can be costly. “Not being clear about where you intend to go and why is a big reason why 80 percent of new companies fail in the first five years. With a clear vision, it’s much easier to succeed,” says Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity, an Atlanta, Georgia, USA-based consulting firm focused on strategic and technology project acceleration. Click for more

		Jack Bergstrand: Reinvent Your Enterprise Jack Bergstrand is the CEO of Brand Velocity, former CIO of The Coca-Cola Company and author of Reinvent Your Enterprise, which was recently endorsed by The Drucker Institute. Bergstrand wrote Reinvent Your Enterprise based on his experiences at Coca-Cola and to expand on the “knowledge work” insights of management legend Peter F. Drucker. Click for more

		Expert Voices Slideshow: Former Coke CIO Bergstrand on Reinventing the Enterprise As CIO of Coca-Cola, Jack Bergstrand helped turn around a company that was losing $1 million a week. During his tenure, Coke's stock soared from $3 to $22. Now CEO of Brand Velocity, Bergstrand is out with the new book, Reinvent Your Enterprise. Here are some snippets of wisdom from the book, and Bergstrand's blog. Click for more

		Holistic CIO Lessons from Peter Drucker The tried and true method of managing large technology projects continues to be tried — but the truth is that it consistently underperforms. Technologists usually try to explain projects in ways that are very difficult for business people to understand and business people just as often offer advice that is very counterproductive. The result is often ugly. Fortunately, it doesn’t need to be this way. Click for more

		IT's Need for Speed When it comes to making fundamental changes to a business, speed trumps everything, says consultant Jack Bergstrand. Indeed, the firm of which he is CEO is called Brand Velocity, for its focus on helping companies in reinvention mode accelerate their time frames. Click for more

		Twenty-first Century Management—Drucker Style Over the past 50 years, we have moved into the Knowledge Age—with most people earning their livings being knowledge workers: managers, analysts, and service providers. During the transition from manual work to knowledge work, something unexpected happened—or rather, did not happen. Unlike farming and manufacturing, we have not yet been able to successfully and systematically improve the productivity of knowledge work. The management approach that worked so well for farming and manufacturing has failed us in the Knowledge Age.

		Sidestep Project Management Landmines Another dimension of leadership is ensuring that the person leading the project has the expertise needed to do so. But, says Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity, the program director for a company is usually a respected business or technology executive who has never run a large IT project before. Click for more

		Reinventing IT Project Management - Peter Drucker Style Drucker consistently pointed out the need for business leaders to reinvent their enterprises by systematically improving their knowledge work (organizational) productivity. It's clear that the next generation of project management will need to be at the heart of this reinvention because projects are the only true mechanism for sustainable change. Click for more

		How to Reinvent Your Company Through Better Enterprise Risk Management Transcending “scientific management” in the Knowledge Age Enterprise reinvention and enterprise risk management have been a challenge to implement in many large organizations. The key to unlocking the potential of both is to understand and overcome why the traditional implementation approach consistently struggles. Click for more

		Book It: Best Bets for Board Reading A Wall That Must Be Broken Through Peter Drucker warned managers, consultants, academics and government officials for decades that we were in danger. He made it clear that for the prosperity of the developed world to continue—let alone grow—we need to systematically break through the knowledge work productivity wall. We have made massive investments in technology for decades but the math ultimately doesn't work, and pushing the old scientific management system harder isn't sufficient. A better management system is required. Click for more

		Buck the Budget Blues Getting A Better Handle On Your IT Budget Doesn’t Have To Be Mission Impossible Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity and author of Reinvent Your Enterprise, suggests formally linking the organization’s application architecture to its organizational structure—in other words, connecting the dots between applications and how they relate to key business and customer decision makers. This process can help IT managers determine when to discontinue less valuable systems while boosting spending on more valuable applications. Click for more

		What We’re Reading Reinvent Your Enterprise Through Better Knowledge Work Need to remake your organization? Coca-Cola veteran and management consultant Jack Bergstrand lays out a process for enhancing knowledge worker productivity, which management guru Peter Drucker once identified as the greatest challenge of the 21st century.

		New chapter of Drucker Society launches to mark centennial The Drucker Society of Georgia is launching Thursday, the 100th birthday of the late management thinker Peter F. Drucker, whose namesake business school is at Claremont Graduate School. "The mission of the Georgia chapter is to improve the lives of young people in Georgia by applying Peter Drucker's principles in conjunction with Georgia educational, government, community and business leaders," according to a news release. Click for more

		The Drucker Society of Georgia Launches on Peter F. Drucker’s 100th Birthday The Drucker Society of Georgia will work with leaders in Georgia education, government, community and business organizations who are committed to improving the lives of young men and women in a sustainable way. Over time, the organization plans to engage 100 leaders who can impact the lives of 1 million young men and women through institutional reinvention–using the Drucker-inspired principles and tools articulated in Reinvent Your Enterprise.

		Review: Reinvent Your Enterprise by Jack Bergstrand Reinvent Your Enterprise builds upon the insights of legendary management thinker Peter F. Drucker to help individuals and organizations improve business results better and faster, by leading the next management frontier--improving knowledge work productivity. This breakthrough book is endorsed by The Drucker Institute and has been featured in BusinessWeek.com. It fuses extensive research, practical application, and a proven knowledge work productivity management system. Click for more

		Reinvent Your Enterprise Reinvent Your Enterprise explores the concept of knowledge work: what it is, how it differs from manual labor, and perhaps most importantly how to determine what needs to be done and when. Really, it’s all about clarity: understanding your business, your clients, and your employees. Then, using this knowledge to simplify, focus, and make use of available skills to build a better company.

		“Tom on Leadership” Show: Personal Board of Directors Top performing leaders almost invariably have a formal or informal group of advisors and mentors, a sort of Personal Board of Directors, with whom they share their problems and from whom they seek advice and counsel. Our first guest is Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity and author of Reinvent Your Enterprise, endorsed by the Drucker Institute. Click for more

		September eBriefing: Author Notes Brand Velocity, an Atlanta-based IT consulting firm to Fortune 500 companies, has opened a Western Group in Los Angeles and hired Jay Wagman to lead the Los Angeles office. Click for more

		Jay Wagman Joins Brand Velocity as Managing Director “With a proven track record in business and technology solutions, Jay Wagman will play an important role to help clients with not only ‘what to do’ but ‘how to do it’ better and faster,” said Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity. Click for more

		Jay Wagman Joins Brand Velocity as Managing Director Brand Velocity, Inc., the Atlanta-based project acceleration company, today announced that it has opened its Los Angeles office and Managing Director Jay Wagman will lead the Western Group. Wagman has more than 20 years of experience in productively applying innovative technology to increase business performance.

		Reinventing Enterprise The hoss, the goose, and the tortoise Many organizations are going from apparent success to real failure—almost overnight—because the management practices and business model that made them successful ultimately failed them. They cut costs to improve efficiency (restructuring), but didn't change their business model to improve productivity with customers (reinvention).

		Reinvent Your Enterprise Through Better Knowledge Work I recently read Jack Bergstrand's book “Reinvent Your Enterprise Through Better Knowledge Work”. Bergstrand is a Peter Drucker student and continues on Drucker’s path. Drucker is one of my favorite management thinkers. It is a good book. Inspired thought (and that is what makes a good book for me).

		Brand Velocity CEO Jack Bergstrand to Offer Tips on Achieving Sustainable Enterprise Reinvention During BetterManagement Webcast The BetterManagement webcast series provides global thought leaders focused on performance management, financial management, business intelligence and IT management with a forum to discuss critical business management issues and present best practices used by some of today’s most successful companies. Click for more

		Book Review: Reinvent Your Enterprise by Jack Bergstrand Jack Bergstrand has created quite a book in Reinvent Your Enterprise, and takes a long hard look at the economics of the information age. The concept put forward in Reinvent Your Enterprise consists of four building blocks that will enhance ‘knowledge work productivity.’ These four elements interrelate in a clear fashion, and by using them, many pitfalls can be avoided. Reinvent Your Enterprise is not your regular self help business book. This is a well researched and heavily footnoted exploration of the Knowledge-based environment that we find ourselves in today. Click for more

		Smart Lemming Review: Bergstrand’s Reinvent Your Enterprise What are the most conducive organization structure, processes and principles that allows a company or Enterprise to be productive? Bergstrand answers this question with his book, Reinvent Your Enterprise: Through Better Knowledge Work. Building on Peter Drucker’s approach to management and knowledge workers, Reinvent Your Enterprise is Bergstrand’s doctoral work at The George Washington University, combined with his firm’s consulting clients. The result is a practical, research-based knowledge work productivity framework and process for the Knowledge Age. Click for more

		Why IT Project Governance Is Flawed—And How to Fix It By now, it’s clear that the project management approach developed during the twentieth century for traditional projects like building roads and buildings has proven to be unsuccessful in the twenty-first century with enterprise IT project management and other projects that have high “knowledge work” components. The father of modern management, Peter F. Drucker, was the first to recognize this problem with respect to managing knowledge work and emphasized repeatedly our need to solve it. I also address this in my recent book, Reinvent Your Enterprise, a book which has been endorsed by the Drucker Institute. Click for more

		Compensation, Brand Velocity Style: A consulting firm gets creative with pay At the IT consultancy Brand Velocity, Jack Bergstrand uses a base salary plus a point system to determine employees’ compensation. Sometimes the CEO gets less than his subordinates. Click for more

		Brand Velocity's Knowledge-Worker Innovation Brand Velocity may well be the smartest company you've never heard of. Jack Bergstrand, who used to oversee information technology at Coca-Cola (KO), launched the consulting firm five years ago with a goal of more than just making money. He wanted to take on what Peter Drucker identified as the single greatest business challenge of our day: enhancing knowledge-worker productivity. Click for more To see a video of Jack Bergstrand in conversation with Rick Wartzman, executive director of the Drucker Institute, click here.

		Jack Bergstrand: Getting Business Impact of IT to Flow at Coca-Cola & At Other Companies Today, Bergstrand, who previously led The Coca-Cola Company’s global Information Technology organization, now leads Brand Velocity, a consulting firm focused on helping Fortune 500 companies improve the business impact of IT across large-scale technology projects. He says, “We help our clients rapidly identify and overcome the business issues that cause 70 percent of large technology projects to fall behind or fail completely.” In this podcast, he also provides some of the warning signs CIOs need to look for to prevent project delays. Click for more

		Why Conventional Project Management Fails Managed well, enterprise projects can improve revenue, increase savings and produce operational benefits. However, when things go wrong, large-scale projects can cost companies millions of dollars and negatively impact their corporate brands. Until project teams evolve past the old manual work project management approach, and learn to effectively manage knowledge work components, enterprise projects will continue to exceed budgets and deadlines.

		On-the-go execs use tech devices for business “We’re really at a time when the use of technology in personal and professional lives has converged,” says Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity, Inc. and former vice president of business systems for The Coca-Cola Co. “We don’t just go to the office to use technology, and we don’t just use the phone as a phone.” Click for more

		Weathering the Perfect Storm: How Executives and Boards Can Help Improve Large Technology Projects For too many organizations, major information technology projects turn out badly. The demand planning project that was intended to revolutionize the business, but now forecasts large overruns. The new supply chain system that was expected to reduce inventory, speed orders and satisfy customers—but instead has added operational complexity and increased customer dissatisfaction. Click for more

		Brand Velocity Develops Strategic Profiling^® Instrument to Accelerate Enterprise Projects Building upon the insights of Peter Drucker, and the upcoming book Reinvent Your Enterprise, Strategic Profiling helps individuals and teams implement and accelerate large enterprise projects. Click for more

		The IT Productivity Paradox Despite massive investments in IT, companies have largely failed to get solid returns. Brand Velocity CEO and author Jack Bergstrand explains how executives need a different approach to better manage productivity.

		Nation waits for first chief technology officer “Probably the greatest role of a CTO is to establish a more holistic view of government and to begin articulating the effective and efficient role of technology to build new capabilities,” said Jack Bergstrand, former vice president of business systems for The Coca-Cola Co. and now CEO of Brand Velocity Inc. Click for more

		Brand Velocity Launches Strategic Profiling Instrument Brand Velocity, Inc., the Atlanta-based project acceleration company, announced the launch of Strategic Profiling, a knowledge work acceleration instrument. The instrument helps companies improve team productivity to achieve project goals better and faster with less risk.

		Brand Velocity Develops Strategic Profiling^® Instrument to Accelerate Enterprise Projects Brand Velocity, Inc., the Atlanta-based project acceleration company, today announced the launch of Strategic Profiling, a knowledge work acceleration instrument. Building upon the insights of Peter Drucker, and the upcoming book Reinvent Your Enterprise, Strategic Profiling helps individuals and teams implement and accelerate large enterprise projects.

		Brand Velocity Launches Strategic Profiling Application Jack Bergstrand, CEO of Brand Velocity said, “Enterprise projects require a strong dose of knowledge work – above and beyond the technology involved. Since knowledge work is invisible and ever-changing, it is the greatest risk associated with enterprise projects.” Click for more

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