Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap [Kindle Edition]

This book does capture the findings from the work of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable in a excellent way. The cases in the book are real and are brilliant proofs of the fact that it is possible to run even a large corporation with out traditional budget models. I'm really looking forward to the follow up.

"Beyond Budgetting" describes a new way of managing your organization and its performance, a way without having budgets. Not having budgets does not mean chaos, it does not mean no control or visibility, it means using different organizational structures to manage the performance and resource distribution within your organization.

The book consists of four parts. The first part describes budgeting and the problems that are inherent to the budgeting process. It introduces an alternative based on what several companies have done, with the prime example being the Swedish Handelbanken. It splits the beyond budgeting concept it two adaptive process for managing performance and radical decentralization. These are covered in the next two parts.

The second and third part describe the two legs of beyond budgeting. The structure of the chapters is similar. The first chapter describes three cases of organizations that implemented these and similar concepts. The second chapter covers the principles while the last chapter in each part covers hints for implementation.

The adaptive process for managing performance suggests to set relative targets, decouple rewards from target setting, provide resources on request, and provide up to date and transparent information to everyone within the organization. Radical decentralization is build on top of this and recommends to empower people close to customers to make the decisions, work within teams and create an open and transparent information system that supports these people to make local decisions.

The last part of the book contains two chapters. The first one describes tools (and could have been left out from my perspective, didn't added much to the rest of the book). The second chapter described an overall vision for management in the 21th century and how Beyond Budgeting fits in that.

I liked the book, it challenges a whole lot of management assumptions and demonstrates an alternative not based on speculation but based on real cases. My only objection to the book was exactly that. Beyond budgeting is created based on what a couple of real companies do... but these companies all did slightly different things at different degrees. This variance makes the book sometimes hard to read as it makes it hard to fix the concept "beyond budgeting." Perhaps this was the authors intention... though from the readers perspective it would probably be easier to first describe the concepts and then move to case studies and show how different companies implemented the beyond budgeting concepts. Because of this, I considered a 3 star review... but as this book really provides a new concept, I feel that wouldn't be fair. So, four stars and a definitive recommendation for people who are tired of budgeting hell (aren't we all?) and like to know if there is an alternative. There is... it is called: Beyond budgeting!

As a business consultant with many years experience in budgeting, I found this a very useful overview of a relatively new topic in finance. The authors clearly show the limitations of the traditional budgeting process and present a comprehensive alternative.
However, while the book brings many examples from real companies, many of the ideas still seem a little conceptual and difficult to imagine how they would actually work in practise.

This book will certainly interest anyone seriously involved in budgeting.