Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap

This concise and cogent management study focuses on reforming the traditional annual budgeting process. The authors, both experienced consultants, argue persuasively that the""fixed-performance contract"" mode of conventional budgeting increases costs and delays and centralizes decision-making to the point of reduced flexibility and adaptability. In the current rapidly changing business environment (particularly international business), where there's less of a demand for strictly hierarchical models of management, decentralized budgeting and devolved authority are quite simply survival issues for businesses. The authors focus on reforms made at Swedish wholesaler Ahlsell and Swedish bank Svenska Handelsbanken, as well as the British truck manufacturer Leyland. But they also cast the net over the chemical firm Borealis and the operating model of household furnishings company IKEA. Inevitably, the authors cannot get too far beyond summaries, and their reliability depends somewhat on the credibility of their in-house sources. But in an information age when branch offices can maintain adequate data files, and in the post-Enron milieu when everyone seeks barriers to fraud, this is a persuasively argued starting point.