This Is Beyond Budgeting: A Guide to More Adaptive and Human Organizations

by Bjarte Bogsnes

Beyond Budgeting is the idea of making organizations perform better by changing their management model, including abolishing the traditional budgeting process. The model’s tested and proven leadership and management process recommendations makes organizations more adaptive and human, and helps making agile transformations successful. This book is written for decision makers within an enterprise. In nontechnical language it explains what Beyond Budgeting is, how it works, and why it improves performance through the use of actual cases where it has been implemented. It discusses what challenges will need to be overcome to make implementation succeed and provides the many benefits that can be realized once the organization has completed the implementation.

Genres: Business, Leadership, Finance, Management

176 pages, Hardcover

Published February 1, 2023

Reviews

[Fabrice · Rating 5 out of 5]

An often forgotten key to agility at scale

Transforming an organisation requires finding the blind spots that have prevented the necessary transformation before. These are probably core assumptions that are taken as absolute givens.

Beyond Budgeting probably found the one assumption that every bureaucracies take for absolutely granted: an annual budgeting exercise that wrongly mixes forecasting, resource allocation and management. It has many downsides, but for me the biggest one is the incentive to lie.

I loved the book for helping me discover that blind spot and the very practical advice on how to change that.

[Massimiliano Mauriello · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve just finished reading “𝐓𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐢𝐬 𝐁𝐞𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐝 𝐁𝐮𝐝𝐠𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 – 𝐀 𝐆𝐮𝐢𝐝𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐀𝐝𝐚𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐇𝐮𝐦𝐚𝐧 𝐎𝐫𝐠𝐚𝐧𝐢𝐳𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬” by Bjarte Bogsnes and with forward by the legendary Professor Gary Hamel.

Bjarte Bogsnes is one of the maximum global experts on Beyond budgeting and has greatly contributed to spread the concepts behind the Beyond Budgeting movement as well as to implement its techniques and philosophy in a plethora of companies since many years ago. He is, among the others, also the founder of the “Beyond Budgeting Roundtable” (BBRT) https://bbrt.org and already wrote others books on this same topic.

Basing on pure logic and even good common sense, often through simple, disarming and irrefutable statements, this book clearly debunks the myths and concepts upon which the Budget is grounded.
Times have changed, we by now live in a VUCA world and a tool that was fairly functioning until the first half of last century it isn’t anymore and shows all its flaws, contradictions, uselessness and even its harmfulness.

This book contains the answers to different fundamental questions and doubts I’ve been raising to myself since many years ago about the validity of the Budget itself; it is a welcome and so interesting response, kind of” All that you always wanted to know about Budgeting, but were afraid to ask” or “What they don’t teach you at University about Budgeting”.

Introducing and implementing Beyond Budgeting techniques and philosophy means mainly acting and operating in a Management Innovation domain, more than on a Technology Innovation one.

This book is definitely a must read for whoever wants to get acquainted with the philosophy and the main techniques which are behind the innovative movement of Beyond Budgeting learning them from a pioneer in this field and one of the main global advocates of this innovative movement that is rapidly gaining ground.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐥𝐞𝐦 𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐢𝐦 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐡𝐢𝐠𝐡 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐬, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐰𝐞 𝐚𝐢𝐦 𝐭𝐨𝐨 𝐥𝐨𝐰 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐢𝐭”
(𝐀𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐭𝐥𝐞).

My original post on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/...

Link to my blog post:
http://massimilianomauriello.blogspot...

#BeyondBudgeting #budget #Management #Innovation #ManagementInnovation #Finance #books #summerreadings

[Andrei Gavrila · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hard to rate. What do I rate? Beyond Budgeting in general? Just this book?

I hesitated between 2, 3, and 4 stars. Let me tell you why.

First, this book is less about budgeting and more about a leadership and management philosophy. This is a bummer, in my opinion, as the book does not deliver on its title in a way. In another, it does. Because I do agree that the practice of yearly budgeting is just a display of old command and control, the tayloristic way of managing a company. But the problem remains. Give this book to someone from finance who is not open to the subject, and they will easily shoot it down with decent arguments. That's the 2 star part of the rating.

The 3 start part of the rating is due to the fact that while the book is small, it rarely kept me wanting more. I found myself reading it in full focus 2-3 times, and it was in a later chapter. But it clearly explains BB; it has a decent flow, so this is why I would rate it 3 stars.

I would rate the idea of stopping the yearly budgets as 4 stars, and I feel there are parts that this book nails because it clearly explains why we should stop doing it.

[Nicolas Leroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a scrum master it occurred to me that working with scrum with your teams, and working with yearly budgets at management level, was creating a lot of problems.
Thanks to this book I found there is a better way, and also there is a community of people that saw the exact same issue and worked already on possible solutions.
This book makes me want to read even more on beyond budgeting. Especially on the implementation. In order for me to find a way to reach out to management in case they still work with yearly budgets.
Thanks Bjarte!

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short little intro to the world of beyond budgeting, more of an entree or appetizer to get you into this world. Recommend for people not so familiar with the approach but if you've read Bjarte's previous book you may find that you are already aware of most of this content. Either way it is a nice refresher and an easy read!

[Ville Svärd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good, concise introduction

[Nacho Bassino]

Not what I expected. It's not an intro to the topic. You need to read the other book first.

[Victor Couto alves · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comecei a trabalhar na Equinor no início de 2023 e uma das coisas que mais me chamaram atenção foi seu sistema e princípios de gestão e liderança. Foi assim que conheci o conceito por trás, o Beyond Budgeting. O Bjarte Bogsnes retrata de forma bastante clara e objetiva como o sistema funciona e de fato vejo na prática os benefícios que isso traz, especialmente no retorno para os acionistas em relação aos pares assim como a satisfação de quem trabalha na empresa! Excelente dica de livro pra quem deseja conhecer a cultura de gestão e liderança da Equinor assim como entender os conceitos para começar a implementar na própria empresa.

[Quinton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must read for executives for insights into a different budgeting model to the current traditional model that is over 100 years old. The model described by Bogsnes is a core piece to enable your organization to become adaptive, and in the age of disruption, it is the adaptive that will survive.

Read this book for a primer on the subject. If you like it, read some more or get a consultant and run a small experiment to see for yourself the impact that changing the way we budget can have on our productivity, profitability and effectiveness. Once you have proven this model in your small experiment, well, the ball is in your court for next steps.

Beyond Budgeting is a core piece of Better ways of Working.