Our Agile Tales
Our Agile Tales
Beyond Budgeting: 25 Years of Management Innovation Episode #5
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Welcome back to Our Agile Tales as we continue our conversation with Bjarte Bogsnes, exploring case studies from his latest book, This Is Beyond Budgeting. The book distills nearly three decades of experience challenging traditional budgeting, targets, and control-based management.
In this episode, Bjarte discusses David Lloyd Clubs’ Beyond Budgeting shift starting in October 2019 and how it helped during the 2020 pandemic through greater local autonomy and faster, more continuous funding decisions. He explains the core change of separating budget purposes into distinct processes for target setting, forecasting (as non-binding forecasts), and resource allocation, with more local decision-making and a revised cadence beyond annual budgets. Bogsnes addresses budget gaming by isolating it to target setting and using relative performance and transparency to encourage improvement while avoiding naming-and-shaming, emphasizing holistic performance evaluation when measures are absolute.
The conversation also covers beyond budgeting relevance to the public sector via a pilot in Sogndal Municipality, Norway, and TDR Capital’s role as a private equity owner encouraging portfolio companies to adopt beyond budgeting, including examples like Stonegate and BPP.
Key topics and timestamps
- 00:00 Welcome
- 01:06 Pandemic Autonomy Lessons
- 02:54 Separating Budget Purposes
- 06:11 Funding Autonomy And Cadence
- 07:28 Stopping Gaming With Benchmarks
- 12:31 Transparency Without Shaming
- 14:24 All 12 Principles In Practice
- 15:05 Beyond Budgeting In Government
- 20:04 Collaboration And Member Impact
- 22:45 TDR Capital’s Playbook
- 25:41 How To Start The Journey
- 27:15 Private Equity Differentiator
- 28:11 Wrap Up and Conclusion
About Bjarte Bogsnes
Bjarte Bogsnes is Chairman of the Beyond Budgeting Round Table, a former global finance executive, and a leading thinker in management innovation. He is the author of Implementing Beyond Budgeting and This Is Beyond Budgeting, showing how organizations can replace rigid, calendar-driven systems with models built on trust, transparency, and adaptability — creating companies that are both more responsive and more human.
Follow Bjarte at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/bjarte-bogsnes-41557910/
Music: https://www.purple-planet.com
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