'Beyond Budgeting' has been around for nearly twenty years now. Although it has helped transform many businesses and its has begun to become part of mainstream management thinking in some parts of the world, I talk to many business people who have still not heard of Beyond Budgeting.
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 to think in a very narrow way about the process of management.
This small but serious handbook fills in these gaps in awareness and understanding by answering the question what is Beyond Budgeting? in a clear and succinct way to help managers make informed choices about the way that you run their business, as an alternative to blindly copying their predecessors.
Amongst the things covered in the book 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 Beyond Budgeting helps enable superior financial performance, more efficient processes and a more fulfilling environment for employees
> 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 an unpredictable world.
