About the problems of budgeting:

"Budgeting is the bane of corporate America" - Jack Welch, ex CEO, General Electric

"The process of management is not about administering fixed budgets, it is about the dynamic allocation of resources" - Lord Browne, CEO, BP

"I don't believe that I, as CEO of Novartis, should give specific quarterly guidance to analysts. That's their business. The analysts can, on their own make their estimates. If we say exactly how much we will earn in the next quarter or the next three quarters - and then hit it each and every time - it means we are playing with the numbers." - Daniel Vasella, CEO, Novartis  

"My advice is to stop budgeting at once and start to think about your problems afresh. That is the only way to really wipe the blackboard clean and get better and more informative figures on it. You should brace yourself and kill the budget dragon with one blow" - Dr Jan Wallander, Honorary Chairman, Svenska Handelsbanken  

"Uncertainty - in the economy, society, politics has become so great as to render futile, if not counterproductive, the kind of planning most companies still practice: forecasting based on probabilities" - Peter Drucker

"It is universally apparent that we are living in a world so complex and so uncertain that authoritarian, control-oriented companies are bound to fail" - Gary Hamel

"Dr Hope, preaching at Cambridge University, said that the mountain of paperwork and labyrinthine bureaucracy of the established Church meant that it was failing in its duty to help the "spiritually lost people of the surfing generation". .Dr Hope, in his sermon, described the initial concept as a "top down approach altogether hierarchical". He said that the approach was perceived from the start as "alien to an Anglican understanding both of the Church and of its structures and authority". He called for a more "bottom up" model, with power centred on the parishes. After his sermon, Dr Hope said that he thought the church structure was one reason why clergy job satisfaction was "patchy". We need a more dynamic, more flexible, more responsive Church" - Dr David Hope, Archbishop of York, England

About the beyond budgeting solution:

"Recent events have shown that there has never been a better time for a radical reassessment of how we manage organizations. We face rapid change despite having more limited sight than at any time since the 1940s. A climate of international terrorism and volatile stock markets does not encourage planning beyond weeks and months, never mind months and years. We need more adaptive processes and a culture that supports them. Instead, too often we have fixed targets and fixed plans. They no longer make sense. Beyond budgeting is a provoking alternative we should take seriously" - Charles T. Horngren, Littlefield Professor of Accounting, Emeritus, Stanford University

"Beyond budgeting is an idea that promotes an agile and innovative, forward looking, customer and people oriented enterprise, that empowers its entrepreneur-managers to continuously develop new and original solutions to unexpected and non-programmable opportunities and problems."- Michel J. Lebas, Professor of Management Accounting, H.E.C. School of Management, France 

"In "Beyond Budgeting", Robin Fraser and Jeremy Hope have distilled the emerging management model for the Information Age. They recognise the latent wealth that can be released through empowerment and collaboration and the blinders that fixed planning create. This is not a book for the manager who wants to tinker; this is a book for leaders with the courage and insight to sweep away an enervating management dogma. We expect to see Beyond Budgeting organisations gain wider recognition as leaders in wealth creation for their shareholders and their people" - Gregor Pillen. EMEA Head of Financial Management Solutions, IBM Business Consulting Services  

"Stretching allows people to constantly reach for the goal. And people are getting more and more comfortable with the idea that you can get the best out of people not by fighting budgets, which are all about minimal numbers, but by getting people to do the best they can, and measuring their progress toward it - against last year, against what competitors are doing. We're in the process of enriching our organization through the stretch concept. Operating margins are 50 percent higher than they were for the first one hundred and eight years of our company, and in a tougher global environment" - Jack Welch, CEO, General Electric