The budget evolved from a management tool into an obstacle to management.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
What's the point of creating a budget if it's not possible to follow through?
By necessity, budgets require hard choices.
Management must manage!
There is a difficult leap between talking about balancing the budget and actually doing it.
Many think of management as cutting deals and laying people off and hiring people and buying and selling companies. That's not management; that's dealmaking.
And, we have no such thing as a budget anymore. Our manager freaks when we show him the bill. We're lavish to the bone, but all our money goes back into the product.
We developed during the 1990s a series of budget process rules that helped us bring to heel these deficits, diminishing every year and moving the budget so into surplus.
The budget is not just a collection of numbers, but an expression of our values and aspirations.
Manage your spending by creating and sticking to a budget.
Balanced budget requirements seem more likely to produce accounting ingenuity than genuinely balanced budgets.