Although Beyond Budgeting is about so much more than just budgets, our name tends to draw people, at least initially, towards the budget word. Once there, cost management often pops up as the number one issue, for obvious reasons. How can we manage cost without a budget?
Bjarte Bogsnes
Bjarte Bogsnes has a long international career, both in Finance and HR. He is Chairman of Beyond Budgeting Roundtable (BBRT). He is a popular international business speaker and is the winner of a Harvard Business Review/McKinsey Management Innovation award. Bjarte is also author of "Implementing Beyond Budgeting - Unlocking the Performance Potential", where he writes about his twenty years long Beyond Budgeting journey. Statoil has opened up for Bjarte to undertake select external consulting work.
Author's Articles
Beyond Budgeting has now been around for twenty years. More and more companies across the world are embarking on a Beyond Budgeting journey, from global giants to smaller ones not yet strangled by corporate controls and bureaucracy, eager to protect their start-up agility as they grow.
“Control” is an interesting word in the management vocabulary. It is a word many managers struggle with defining. Beyond “cost control”, most are quite vague when it comes to other definitions.
I belong to the rather small group of Finance people who also have worked in Human Resources. The four years I headed up HR in the petrochemicals company Borealis was a great experience (after heading up Finance where we kicked out the budget already back in 1995, another great experience!).