Beyond Budgeting: How Managers Can Break Free from the Annual Performance Trap
by Jeremy Hope, Robin Fraser
Category: Business & Economics

In their groundbreaking book, authors Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser show how organizations can break free from the annual budget trap once and for all. Beyond Budgeting is not a new financial-planning process - it is an alternative, coherent management model that enables companies to manage performance through processes specifically tailored to today's volatile marketplace. Hope and Fraser spent five years studying a wide range of international companies - from a global corporation to a small charity, from a bank to a ball-bearings manufacturer - that have already abandoned traditional budgeting to varying degrees. From these pioneering experiences, the authors have distilled a set of guiding principles that will take any company beyond budgeting to a whole new level of competitiveness. Based on the decision-making needs of front-line managers, Beyond Budgeting enables readers to take advantage of two major opportunities: 1) a set of adaptive management processes that replace centrally controlled, predetermined goals with self-regulating, relative competitive benchmarks, and 2) the transfer of power and decision-making authority from the center of the organization to the front line.