“Many of the original Beyond Budgeting suggestions have become mainstream”

My initial motivation to explore Beyond Budgeting was mainly driven by excitement and curiosity. Back then, the ideas were still in their infancy. What fascinated me the most was the broader topic of steering and management models - and the possibility of finding non-traditional, more innovative approaches. A second interest of mine was the evolution and diffusion of management innovations, especially the question of why some ideas gain traction in the corporate world while others don't. My journey deepened during my doctoral research at WHU, where I explored Beyond Budgeting in more empirical detail. I read everything that had been published on the topic and interviewed companies that had either implemented Beyond Budgeting or that had been operating in line with its principles from the outset often without ever knowing about the concept and without having adopted traditional budgeting at all.

Full size image

Ever since, I've remained deeply connected to the concept and I am still curious how effective management models can help organizations to become more agile and empowered, a question that is still highly relevant. For example, many companies today are looking for ways to become more innovative and agile or to preserve those qualities as they scale. Others are developing dedicated sustainability strategies or embracing a broader sense of purpose to strengthen their identity and motivate their workforce. And of course, many are focused on empowering employees and creating workplaces that attract top talents in an increasingly competitive environment. In all these cases, Beyond Budgeting offers compelling answers to the question of how management processes can be designed to activate and support these ambitions. That's why I often use the concept in HEC's MBA and executive education programs to equip participants with frameworks and ideas they can use to challenge existing practices and develop more effective, future-ready approaches.

Absolutely. Beyond Budgeting is often misunderstood as just a tweak to the budgeting process, especially in the DACH countries, but it's much more than that. In fact, comparing Beyond Budgeting to traditional budgeting or ‘Better Budgeting' is like comparing a fruit basket to a single apple. Beyond Budgeting challenges not only how we do budgets, but how we steer and lead organizations altogether. The name itself reflects this ambition. The founders of the movement saw that traditional budgeting reinforces command-and-control thinking, which limits agility, innovation, and employee empowerment. Their argument was: If we want more adaptive, human-centered organizations, we need to move beyond traditional budgeting and beyond the mindset that comes with it. They therefore developed twelve principles that serve as a framework for designing a progressive management model. These principles cover both leadership and management processes. The leadership principles promote trust, transparency, and decentralization, while the process principles guide how to plan, allocate resources, set targets, and evaluate performance in more dynamic and empowering ways. Beyond Budgeting is not about improving the apple - it's about rethinking the whole fruit basket.

Full size image

Full size image

First and foremost, I'm involved because I genuinely enjoy participating in the conferences - they are a great opportunity to exchange ideas and learn about innovative management models. The Beyond Budgeting Round Table is also a non-profit network, so its members' motivation is not financial but largely idealistic. The people involved are united by the belief that traditional command-and-control management models no longer serve companies or their employees well. I guess what brings them together is to exchange on a shared question: What should the management model of the 21st century look like? That's what its all about. As a researcher, I aim to bring structure and perspective to the discussion. Abstracting, categorizing and systematizing is something any researcher is trained to do - it involves years of engaging deeply with both the Beyond Budgeting and the traditional budgeting and management literature and practice. Also: Every now and then we face pedagogical questions. For instance, how to design certain workshops at the conferences or how to further develop specific ideas. Here, I bring in my expertise in education and pedagogy.

That's true. For a long time, Beyond Budgeting was misunderstood in the German-speaking world. Many publications failed to recognize that it's not just a tweak to the budgeting process, but a comprehensive management model. It was also misinterpreted as simply abandoning budgets altogether rather than what it actually implies: A proposal to replace traditional budgeting with better, more adaptive processes that still fulfill the core functions of budgeting. Some of its ideas seemed very radical back in the early 2000s, like rolling forecasts and relative targets. But twenty years later, this has changed since even large consulting firms now advocate for relative targets and rolling forecasts have become standard practice. In that sense, many of the original suggestions of Beyond Budgeting have become mainstream. What lies behind this is also the rise of other organizational trends, such as the Agile movement. Although Agile emerged in a different context, software development, it emphasizes many of the same principles: empowered teams, customer centricity, outcome orientation, transparency, and adaptability. In some ways, it almost feels like Beyond Budgeting anticipated all of this 25 years ago. It was ahead of its time, and now the broader business context is now catching up with the progressiveness of the concept. In short, progressive organizations today increasingly adopt management models that, in one way or another, echo the principles of Beyond Budgeting.

Full size image

Full size image

Even though many new company examples have been added over time, the core concept has seen surprisingly few substantial changes. In their original research in the late 1990s, Jeremy Hope and Robin Fraser first outlined ten principles, which were later expanded to twelve. Over time, the wording of these principles has evolved slightly, and different taglines have been used to align the concept more closely with the current business discourse. But beyond these more cosmetic adjustments, the core ideas have remained remarkably consistent. I see that as a strength since these are not short-lived innovations or trends, but rather general principles of a management model. In fact, when you look through other management books published over the years, you'll often find similar ideas being promoted under different labels, but pointing in the same direction.

That's a good question, and one we can answer empirically. There is a remarkable diversity among the companies that identify with Beyond Budgeting: They span across sectors, vary in size, and include both publicly listed corporations, privately held family businesses, as well as non-profits or public sector organizations. In other words, and perhaps unsurprisingly since this is about the design of a management model, it seems that any organization seeking to move beyond a command-and-control approach can draw inspiration from the Beyond Budgeting principles. Whether they go the whole way or not is another question. Let me really emphasize this: The concept doesn‘t prescribe a single ideal model. On the contrary, every organization is encouraged to design its own management model - one that fits its unique context, culture, and strategic needs.

Absolutely. It's important to stress that Beyond Budgeting is based on principles, not on fixed, one-size-fits-all recipes. Each organization must do its own thinking to determine how best to translate a principle into practices that fit its specific context. If you're operating in a highly dynamic, fast-changing environment, what we often call a VUCA world, it's hard to manage effectively with fixed, negotiated targets and rigid plans. The more VUCA your environment, the more adaptive your management processes need to be. Beyond Budgeting then offers powerful ideas to support that kind of adaptability, especially when your business model also relies on empowering people and leveraging their initiative. That said, not every organization has to follow this path. If your environment is highly stable and your organization thrives on top-down direction, perhaps with employees who prefer clear instructions over autonomy, then a traditional command-and-control model with traditional budgets might still serve you perfectly well. The key is to understand what kind of model works best for your particular situation.

With pleasure. We developed the Viable Map methodology for several reasons. The first is to help companies translate the twelve Beyond Budgeting principles into practice by offering a highly visual tool that reduces complexity. In that sense, the Viable Map is to a management model what the Business Model Canvas is to a business model: It can be used in a broad-brush workshop setting of just 30 to 45 minutes, or in a more detailed and analytical way.

Altogether, the tool can guide organizations through four key steps of reflection and design. First, it helps raise awareness by providing a visual language to describe what makes a management model viable. Next, it allows you to discuss your own management model in concrete terms, capturing how your organization actually operates. In the third step, you diagnose: Is the model externally aligned with your environment and the people who make up your organization? Is it internally aligned, meaning do your management processes activate the leadership principles or do they, perhaps unintentionally, work against them? The tool helps answer these questions and even highlights underlying causes. Finally, based on this diagnosis, you can design and evolve your management model to better suit your specific context. In this way, the Viable Map supports a deeper understanding - and continuous improvement - of your management model at every stage. The second purpose of the Viable Map is to make the concept of a management model more pertinent to every manager, whether they lead a team, a business unit, or the entire organization. We want to reinforce the message that all managers should be aware of the management model they are operating within. We believe that such awareness, and the recognition that management models can and should be adjusted to fit specific needs, is a source of competitive advantage. Management models are not static, top-down frameworks but they can be actively innovated and improved at all levels of the organization. To give you a better understanding, let me show you the visualization of how the Viable Map works.

Full size image

We regularly use the Viable Map at our conferences and implementer workshops as a tool to structure and analyze discussions, and I also incorporate it into my teaching. Users and learners appreciate its visual clarity and workshop-friendly design which helps quickly surface areas where management innovation is possible. They also value how easily it brings together people from diverse functions - such as line management, human resources, and finance or controlling - into a shared conversation. Since a management model integrates both leadership principles and management processes, it makes little sense to develop a Viable Map from the perspective of just one function. HR typically plays a key role in shaping leadership principles, so their involvement is essential. Likewise, if a company is undergoing a finance transformation, the workshop shouldn't be limited to the finance or controlling teams. Functions and business units are highly interdependent, and only through cross-functional input can a comprehensive and aligned management model - that is, a viable one - be designed.

The Viable Map often proves to be an eye-opener, particularly for finance and controlling teams, who may not fully realize how deeply their practices shape the overall management model. It helps them see how their processes need to align with leadership principles. A key realization for many finance professionals is also that they play a pivotal role in transforming the management model to foster greater autonomy and decentralized decision-making. At the same time, managers and HR teams benefit from exploring concrete alternatives to traditional management processes - beyond the standard solutions typically proposed by their finance and controlling departments. The rich discussions that emerge from these varying perspectives are incredibly valuable.

Describing, discussing, diagnosing, and designing a management model is a complex task, and there are many different ways to translate the underlying principles into concrete, actionable practices. If you‘re planning to facilitate such a workshop, one key challenge is that it requires a solid understanding of the range of alternative practices available for each principle. Thorough preparation is essential to navigate this effectively. It can also be helpful to involve an experienced facilitator - someone who can ask the right questions, help participants understand that there is no single “correct” answer, keep the discussion focused, and guide the group in identifying potential issues with their existing practices. A good facilitator also ensures that the conversation addresses both the internal alignment of leadership principles and management processes, and the external alignment of the model with the organization's environment and people.

Yes, absolutely. Over time, we've identified several recurring patterns, both successful and less so, and new ones continue to emerge with each workshop. Let me give you a few typical examples of patterns we see in less successful cases: One pattern, “frustrated transformation”, involves a CEO who maybe has introduced a new purpose for her company, aiming to redefine how people work, possibly changing the organizational structure and values. A cultural shift is initiated. However, after three years, the CEO asks what has really changed in the culture, and the realization sets in: the culture remains largely the same. Using the Viable Map, we would see that while the leadership principles have been redefined, no corresponding adjustments were made to the management processes that would activate those principles. As a result, the intended cultural transformation never took hold. This illustrates a classic case of internal misalignment: The leadership principles point in one direction, but the management processes remain traditional. No wonder the new culture didn't thrive.

Another common pattern is “failed quick fixes”. For instance, introducing a rolling forecast in isolation rarely brings meaningful change if other elements of the management model are not aligned with this shift. For example, if the company continues to rely on fixed resource allocation or a traditional reward system, rolling forecasts alone won't significantly enhance adaptability.

We also frequently encounter a pattern we call the “say-do gap”. As the name suggests, this occurs when there's a disconnect between what leaders communicate about the organization's values, transparency, autonomy, or other leadership principles, and how they actually behave in practice. The Viable Map helps reveal these discrepancies, offering a clearer understanding of why certain actions or behaviors don't align with the organization's stated values. This is one of the key strengths of the Viable Map - it sparks meaningful discussions about what management model an organization truly has and the one it truly needs.

If we consider the broader trends mentioned earlier, I believe more companies will move toward empowered and adaptive management models. We also see a variety of emerging practices - such as OKRs - that align well with the goals of Beyond Budgeting.

As for AI-related technologies, they don't fundamentally change performance management in and of themselves. As so often, it depends on how they are used. For example, if you believe that environmental uncertainty can be addressed by setting the “perfect” target more than a year in advance, you might turn to sophisticated machine learning models built on historical data to generate seemingly perfect, fixed targets. But when the environment inevitably shifts, those targets may quickly become irrelevant - especially for purposes like performance evaluation or rewarding. Similarly, you might use AI agents to produce real-time commentary on every budget-to-actual variance. But if the budget itself was outdated by early January, this simply makes you more efficient at reinforcing a command-and-control model - without solving the underlying problem. On the other hand, if you used AI to detect performance differences across comparable organizational units, it could become a powerful enabler of practices like relative performance evaluation.

In a world where algorithms increasingly handle routine tasks, competitive advantage may come more and more from your ability to attract and retain creative, innovative talent. And a command-and-control management model is unlikely to appeal to the kinds of employees who thrive in such environments.