This Is Beyond Budgeting

Introduction

My Beyond Budgeting Journey

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I ended up where I needed to be,” Douglas Adams once wrote. This is the story of my life.

I graduated from business studies in the early 1980s, after a short flirt with a military career. My first management job after joining Norwegian Statoil (now Equinor, one of Scandinavia's largest companies) was as head of the corporate budget department. I have led more budgeting rounds than I want to remember in that and in many later finance roles. Looking back, I have done some quite stupid things in my career. But it also means that I know what I am talking about. I have been there and done that. I know most of the tricks in the budget game, including some quite nasty ones.

There was nothing back then indicating that I would become a vocal opponent of this management concept and the philosophy behind it. I have now been one for almost 30 years. I am still embarrassed about an interview I gave to the in‐house company magazine, praising the brilliance of budgeting. I hope there are no more copies around!

It all started in the mid‐1990s at Borealis, at the time Europe's largest petrochemicals company. The company was partly owned by Statoil and headquartered in Copenhagen. I headed up the corporate finance team. We were all challenged to think of new, different, and better ways of doing our work and of running the company. Our proposal to kick out the budget felt scary. We had not heard ...