Beyond Budgeting

The annual budgeting process is a trap. Pressured by fixed targets and performance incentives, managers focus on making the numbers instead of making a difference, meeting set goals instead of maximizing potential. With their compensation at stake, managers often resort to deceitful-even unethical-behavior. In the end, everybody loses-the employee, the company, and ultimately the customer. Now, finance experts Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser reveal the results of an intensive study aimed at fixing the broken budgeting process. They argue that companies must abandon traditional budgeting contracts in favor of a radical new model that links performance measurement to evolving competitive benchmarks-and shifts the firm's focus from controlling employee behavior to delivering customer value. The Beyond Budgeting model is built on the best practices of companies that have successfully revised their centralized planning and budgeting processes. It combines a leadership vision that devolves more authority to operating managers and a finance vision that enables fast decision making through appropriate tools and accessible information. Through vivid examples, Hope and Fraser illustrate how companies can implement these shared visions-and the long-term benefits that accrue from embracing them. Offering a compelling case for breaking free from the budgeting trap, this book paves the way toward making organizations better places to work for, invest in, and do business with.

The author describes the serious and systemic problems with traditional management practices, and provides concrete alternatives and practical guidance on how to implement the beyond budgeting methodology, drawing on cases in which he has implemented beyond budgeting in large, global companies.

It is difficult to think of a business process that is as widely unpopular, dysfunctional and discredited as traditional budgeting - yet over a decade after the creation of the Beyond Budgeting movement, many business people are unaware of its existence. And many of those that have heard of it find the Beyond Budgeting ideas difficult to grasp because they have been conditioned by experience to think in a very narrow way about the process of management. This book fills in these gaps in awareness and understanding by answering the question ‘what is Beyond Budgeting?’ in a clear and succinct way to help you make informed choices about the way that you run your business, as an alternative to blindly copying your predecessors. Amongst the things you will discover are: How the financial operating model used to organise and run the affairs of an enterprise impacts many aspects of corporate life, not just the level of business performance The universal law of complexity that explains why traditional budgeting will always fail to deliver what it promises: predictable performance. How the Beyond Budgeting process model is better equipped to deal with the complexity of modern organisational life and the uncertainty of the world Why and how an organisation has to be designed to complement the processes used to plan and control its activities. How to bring about change The goal is to help build healthier, more adaptive organisations, better able to meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities thrown up by the modern world.

If the very thought of budgets pushes your sanity over the limit, then this practical, easy-to-use guide is just what you need. Budgeting Basics and Beyond, Third Edition equips you with an all-in-one resource guaranteed to make the budgeting process easier, less stressful, and more effective. Written by Jae Shim and Joel Siegel, the new edition covers Balanced Scorecard, budgeting for nonprofit organizations, business simulations for executive and management training, and much more!

Today, companies are expected to be flexible and both rapidly responsive and resilient to change, which basically asks them to be agile. By combining Beyond Budgeting,Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile, this book provides a practical guide for companies that want to be agile company-wide. Notes to the 2nd edition: This second edition reflects such updates as: the new Agile Fluency Model, the renaming / rebranding of Statoil to Equinor, and some small additions to complexity. We also enhanced the description of Organizational Open Space and explain how it differs from Liberating Structures. Enjoy insights in the book shared by Jez Humble, Diana Larsen, James Shore, Johanna Rothman, and Bjarte Bogsnes. Find out what Spotify, ING, Ericsson, and Walmart say in the book. Quotes from early readers: “[This is] a very important book. My hopes are that it will be the missing link between agile for teams and the flexible, adaptive and humane organisations we want to build. It’s a great book. Thanks for writing it!” ~Sandy Mamoli, author of Creating Great Teams “Just as Spotify has worked hard to make all aspects of product development align well and work together - I see Jutta and John in this book exploring methods and processes that will work very well across the whole company.” ~ Anders Ivarsson, Spotify “I love how those practices [are] integrated and summarized into actionable recommendations.” ~ Yves Lin, Titansoft “Really wonderful balance of structure and space, rigor and creativity, that you're suggesting.” ~ Michael Herman, Openspaceworld.org “Company-wide Agility with Beyond Budgeting, Open Space and Sociocracy [...] makes an important case for companies to regard trust and autonomy the norm, rather than a privilege. [...] Overall a great overview of how leaders can reimagine the way power is distributed within their companies.” ~ Aimee Groth, Author of The Kingdom of Happiness: Inside Tony Hsieh’s Zapponian Utopia This book invites you to take a new perspective that addresses the challenges of doing business in a volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world.

The traditional annual budgeting process--characterized by fixed targets and performance incentives--is time consuming, overcentralized, and outdated. Worse, it often causes dysfunctional and unethical managerial behavior. Based on an intensive, international study into pioneering companies, Beyond Budgeting offers an alternative, coherent management model that overcomes the limitations of traditional budgeting. Focused around achieving sustained improvement relative to competitors, it provides a guiding framework for managing in the twenty-first century.

The future of management is here! Traditional management was invented for very different times and is today in serious trouble. The level of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity in business environments is record high. People’s expectations towards their employers and leaders have also radically changed. A number of organizations are exploring management innovation that can help them not just coping but thriving and out-performing in these new and different realities. Beyond Budgeting may be the most important new idea out there addressing these radical changes, due to its broad scope and coherent approach. Abolishing the traditional, detailed annual budget is necessary, but not sufficient. Organizations on the journey are questioning their old leadership beliefs and are tearing up their old command-and-control management models, with “agile” and “human” as the foundation for a new start. Implementing Beyond Budgeting is both a theoretical introduction and a practical guide to bringing such a more empowered and adaptive management model to life. Drawing on the author’s twenty years of Beyond Budgeting experience, this book not only demonstrates the serious problems with traditional management through numerous practical examples. It also follows several companies on their Beyond Budgeting journey, including Scandinavia’s largest company Statoil where the author has been heading up implementation since 2005. You'll get a first-hand glimpse at the reality of transitioning a large multinational company, and gain a real-world perspective on what successful implementation entails. This new second edition has been significantly revised and expanded. It covers the amazing development of the Beyond Budgeting movement and how the Statoil implementation journey has continued since the first edition of this book was published in 2009, sustaining major events like for instance the 2015 oil price crash. A new chapter on “Beyond Budgeting and Agile” has also been added. New implementation experiences, great new case stories, new management innovation examples and management metaphors (traffic controls!) are introduced, as well as the author’s latest reflections on a range of management issues including target setting, forecasting, performance evaluation and incentives.

Beyond Budgeting is the idea of making organizations perform better by changing their management model, including abolishing the traditional budgeting process. The model’s tested and proven leadership and management process recommendations makes organizations more adaptive and human, and helps making agile transformations successful. This book is written for decision makers within an enterprise. In nontechnical language it explains what Beyond Budgeting is, how it works, and why it improves performance through the use of actual cases where it has been implemented. It discusses what challenges will need to be overcome to make implementation succeed and provides the many benefits that can be realized once the organization has completed the implementation.