Best Practices in Planning and Performance Management: Radically Rethinking Management for a Volatile World, Third Edition

Preface to the First Edition

This book has its origins in my father's study during the late 1970s. Dad had bought one of the first Commodore Pet computers to be sold in the U.K. and was writing BASIC programs to automate the financial reporting for the family furniture business. I was his data entry clerk.

After staying up into the early hours of the morning writing programs and laboriously copying them onto cassette tapes—this being before the days of the first floppy disk—I would help him key in the day's transactions before leaving for school. Over the next few months, we developed a full accounting, budgeting, and financial reporting system for the business—complete with customer database, inventory management system, and scorecard reporting system. We did not know then that this is what these features would come to be called, but they worked. Thus was my interest sparked in planning, management reporting, and the application of computers to business.

Dad sold the family business soon after and moved into computing full time; I left for university to study accounting and computer science. Twenty-five years later, I feel ready to document what I have learned in my journey through the application of technology to business planning and management reporting processes. Starting with my first job at Lloyds Bank (now Lloyds TSB) in London, followed by 18 years in consulting and moving on to research this book, information has been my career. Throughout that time, one of Dad's earliest ...