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

Argues that companies must abandon traditional budgeting contracts in favor of a radical new model that links performance measurement to evolving competitive benchmarks - and shifts the firm's focus from controlling employee behavior to delivering customer value. This book offers a case for breaking free from the budgeting trap. The traditional annual budgeting process--characterized by fixed targets and performance incentives--is time consuming, overcentralized, and outdated. Worse, it often causes dysfunctional and unethical managerial behavior. Based on an intensive, international study into pioneering companies, Beyond Budgeting offers an alternative, coherent management model that overcomes the limitations of traditional budgeting. Focused around achieving sustained improvement relative to competitors, it provides a guiding framework for managing in the twenty-first century.