What is Beyond Budgeting
Beyond Budgeting is about rethinking how we manage organizations in a post-industrial world where innovative management models represent the only sustainable competitive advantage. It is also about releasing people from the burdens of stifling bureaucracy and suffocating control systems, trusting them with information and giving them time to think, reflect, share, learn and improve. Above all it is about learning how to change from many leaders who have built and managed ‘beyond budgeting’ organizations.
What do we mean by "Budgeting"?
The word ‘budgeting’ is not used in its narrow sense of planning and control, but as a generic term for the traditional command and control management model (with budgeting at its core). In this context it describes both a management culture and a performance management system. This might become clearer when you understand how Dr Jan Wallander, architect of the management model at Swedish bank Handelsbanken, saw the problems of budgeting. “The basic idea in the Handelsbanken model is decentralization,” noted Wallander. “If the issues are studied from this viewpoint, the abolition of budgets emerges as a mere detail, something simple and obvious; one of several aspects of the basic idea.”
BBRT - Beyond Budgeting Roundtable