Budgeting no longer helps organisations to perform better. On the contrary. It prevents organisations from performing to their full potential, because given the level of volatility, uncertainty and ambiguity in the world only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know. “The future ain’t what it used to be”, as the American baseball player Yogi Berra once put it.
Steve Morlidge
Steve Morlidge has 30 years of practical experience in designing and running performance management systems in Unilever, including three years as the lead of a global change project. He is a former chairman of the European Beyond Budgeting Round Table and now works as a management thinker, writer and speaker, drawing on his years of experience at the leading edge of performance management thought and practice.
Steve Morlidge published Future Ready: How to Master Business Forecasting, John Wiley, 2010, ‘The Little Book of Beyond Budgeting’ and ‘The Little Book of Operational Forecasting’ through Matador in 2017 and 2018 respectively. He is on the editorial board of Foresight, a forecasting practitioner’s journal published by the International Institute of Forecasting to which he regularly contributes. He is also a cofounder of CatchBull, a supplier of forecasting performance management software and sits on the non-executive Board of the Beyond Budgeting Institute.
Steve Morlidge is a visiting fellow at Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, UK and has a PhD from Hull Business School in Yorkshire, UK focusing on the application of systems concepts to the design of complex organizations. He completed his BA with honors, and he is a qualified management accountant (CIMA).
He can be reached at steve.morlidge@satoripartners.co.uk or steve.morlidge@catchbull.com.
Author's Articles
In this article, Steve Morlidge argues that the quality of business forecasting is unacceptably poor. He goes on to present six simple principles that will help executives significantly improve the performance of their forecast processes.
Many millions of people are stuck with the habit of smoking. They know its bad for them and it will eventually kill them, yet they continue.
In a previous blog post, I mentioned that people who are highly sensitive to the lack of flexibility of traditional budgeting often see rolling forecasts as the answer. So, you might think, forecasts are like budgets but done more frequently – right?