Pioneering organizations & cases

"Pioneers", in our understanding, are organizations that live the BetaCodex. They may be organizations of all kinds and sizes. Usually, they are organizations that have created their own, unique leadership models, based on the Beyond Budgeting principles, as opposed to tayloristic, or command-and-control principles. Essentially, the pioneers have at some point either transformed themselves from a traditional, command-and-control management model to a Beyond Budgeting leadership model - with or without any information about Beyond Budgeting. Or they may also have evolved from their small, start-up days, by maintaining and by making more explicit a highly empowered, "beyond budgeting" culture and model, without ever falling prey to command-and-control.

Each single leadership model of the "pioneers", we have learned, is unique. They are not copies of each other. They often use wildly different tools and denominations to describe what they do. But their leadership models are all based on the same, underlying principles that we call "Beyond Budgeting".

Starting in 1998, the BBRT approached solving the leadership riddle by researching "pioneers" they found, and by deriving the principles of the model from the research results and through debate with their members. This was a formidable act of case-study-based research.

Identifying pioneering organizations has never been an exclusive role of the BBRT, of course. Since 2005 or so, many new cases have been identified and, researched and described by BBTN associates or independent researchers. Overall, since 2008 alone, over 10 new organizations have been identified as pioneers by independent researchers and have been or are still being researched. Today, most of the pioneering case studies are openly and freely available under the Creative Commons license. There are also many publicly available articles and books about the pioneers.

What we can learn from the pioneers

The role of pioneering case studies today, as we see it, is not "proof of concept" any more. Because, scientifically speaking, you only need one case study to prove the concept, or maybe "one per industry", broadly speaking. You only need one Galieo Galilei dropping balls from the tower of Pisa, to prove that Aristotle´s theory about gravitation wasn´t right. Companies like Sweden´s Handelsbanken, Southwest Airlines, Toyota, W.L.Gore have proven the model, over and over.

Further identification of cases and further case research can be useful, however. For one, cases facilitate acceptance and learning and allow insights about specific practices that are coherent with the new mindset. An example is the "job sculpting" practice which was well described by W.L.Gore many years ago, and which few other pioneers have managed to make explicit.

Research about "transforming" organizations will also allow us to learn more about the process of profound change, as well as about the used methods, concepts, and challenges.

The following list contains some of the Beyond Budgeting pioneers and their repective "icons" (see the chapter "leadership model transformation" for a list of the transforming companies).


USA


Germany

France

Spain

Switzerland

The Netherlands

Sweden

Norway

Brazil

Australia

Japan



Transformation case studies.

Some company cases, like that of Ahlsell (Sweden), describe transformation processes quite well. Some companies also initiated "transformation" towards Beyond Budgeting with the advice from the BBTN. Access the BBTN's Transformation Case Studies here.



Other Companies

Many other companies have been linked with the Beyond Budgeting model, over time. Some, because they started "implementing" Beyond Budgeting at some point, some because they were BBRT members, some because they are considered "different", having developed leadership models that not match the complete set of Beyond Budgeting principles, or have´t been properly researched.