Rodrigo Abdalla
Independent advisor, co-author of The Big Zero, founder of ZeroBaseCamp.
Rodrigo Abdalla · Lisbon · 2026
Rodrigo Abdalla is an independent advisor to C-suite leaders running Zero-Based Transformations. Based in Lisbon, he has spent more than two decades designing and executing cost-to-growth reallocations for multinational operators across Europe and the Americas.
He began at Gradus, a boutique consulting firm, in 2003, where he became a partner and spent eleven years embedded in supporting myriad Brazilian companies such as AmBev, Vale, Bunge, Alpargatas, Globo, Votorantim, and Andrade Gutierrez. AmBev's transformation became the operational backbone of AB InBev's global consolidation; the methodology that produced it became the foundation of modern zero-based practice.
In 2017 he joined Accenture in London as ZBx Transformation Director, leading external engagements for clients including McKesson while simultaneously running zero-based inside Accenture itself — the “drink your own champagne” principle that earned the practice its credibility with external clients.
During this period he co-authored The Big Zero(Portfolio Penguin, 2019) with Kris Timmermans and Chris Roark — the first book to reframe zero-based as a discipline for growth rather than a technique for cost reduction. The book was shortlisted for the Business Book Awards 2020 in the Sustainable Change category and carries endorsements from the Chief Financial Officers of Unilever and Campbell Soup Company, the Chief Sustainability and Procurement Officer of Anheuser-Busch InBev, the Executive Director of World 50, and a Fellow at Harvard's Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
He is now based in Lisbon and advises finance and transformation leaders on the practical mechanics of zero-based transformations.
I spend most of my time in the room where the CFO is trying to decide whether certain decisions are robust enough to defend at the next board meeting. That room is where zero-based either survives or becomes something else.
ZeroBaseCamp is what I have been meaning to write from that room for a decade. It is weekly, it is candid, and it is written for the other people in that room, not the ones outside it. If that is you, you are welcome.