Zero-based budgeting is ROI discipline, not a cost program.

In 2003 I joined a Brazilian boutique firm called Gradus, which was helping a brewer called AmBev rewrite its cost base from zero. Nobody called it a “playbook” then. It was just how 3G Capital ran the business. And 5 years later, AB InBev became (and still is) the largest brewer on earth.

Since then, zero-based budgeting has become a consulting product sold to companies with cost problems. But there is a catch: consulting firms write about frameworks, the press writes about austerity, and nobody writes about what it actually feels like to be in the trenches — the fights with division heads, the re-baselining argument, the quarter-three crisis of faith.

I have been there: as the shortlisted author of The Big Zero, as a Gradus partner and Accenture ZBx director at over 30 companies, including zero-basing Accenture itself. ZeroBaseCamp is the weekly field notes from that table, for the operators who have to live with the laurels and consequences.