Book excerpt: It is difficult to think of a business process that is as widely unpopular, dysfunctional and discredited as traditional budgeting - yet over a decade after the creation of the Beyond Budgeting movement, many business people are unaware of its existence. And many of those that have heard of it find the Beyond Budgeting ideas difficult to grasp because they have been conditioned by experience to think in a very narrow way about the process of management. This book fills in these gaps in awareness and understanding by answering the question ‘what is Beyond Budgeting?’ in a clear and succinct way to help you make informed choices about the way that you run your business, as an alternative to blindly copying your predecessors. Amongst the things you will discover are: How the financial operating model used to organise and run the affairs of an enterprise impacts many aspects of corporate life, not just the level of business performance The universal law of complexity that explains why traditional budgeting will always fail to deliver what it promises: predictable performance. How the Beyond Budgeting process model is better equipped to deal with the complexity of modern organisational life and the uncertainty of the world Why and how an organisation has to be designed to complement the processes used to plan and control its activities. How to bring about change The goal is to help build healthier, more adaptive organisations, better able to meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities thrown up by the modern world.