Implementing Beyond Budgeting

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 at a record high. People’s expectations towards their employers and leaders have also radically changed. A number of organisations are exploring management innovation that can help them not just cope but thrive and outperform 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. Organisations 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.