Are (traditional) forecasts meaningful?

Coauthors Frederick Funston and Stephen Wagner ask this question early in their new book Surviving and Thriving in Uncertainty: Creating the Risk Intelligent Enterprise.

They pose the question in a chapter that describes why, and how, conventional risk management has failed.

“The record of forecasting in business, investing, and economics is not good, particularly when it comes to crises, which are by definition improbable and, well, unpredictable,” Funston and Wagner write.

In other words, the failure of conventional forecasting is a prime reason why conventional risk management has failed. more

I glanced at the New York Times list of nonfiction best-sellers and was pleasantly surprised to find a business book, Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, near the top of the heap.

Lewis’s current book examines the forward-looking folks who saw the financial crisis coming and made billions from it. One of his earlier books, Liar’s Poker, also details Wall Street mind-sets – and, in doing so, also happens to describe what’s wrong with the traditional budgeting process.

Really. more

In future posts, I’ll share some highlights from the 9th Annual Beyond Budgeting Round Table Conference. Our event was held in Dallas last month.

In the meantime, here’s a quick report from Dallas Morning News columnist Cheryl Hall, who attended the event. more

“It wasn’t my forecasting ability that got me here — it was my adaptability!”

I am bringing you quotes, information, and a joke in this frontline report from the Beyond Budgeting 9th Annual Conference in Dallas.

As I noted in Wednesday’s blog post, my coauthor of the book Future Ready is trapped in the UK due to the volcanic ash cloud covering much of Europe. Since our conference’s theme is “Future Ready,” Mr. Morlidge will still appear (despite the flight cancellations), virtually. more

Beyond Budgeting’s 9th Annual Conference will start today in Dallas at the Omni Park West Hotel.

This year’s conference features the largest group of hands-on implementers ever assembled. These practitioners include Nevine White of tw telecom and John Hrudicka of Elkay.

White and Elkay join an expanding roster of deployment practitioners, including Bjarte Bogsnes from Statoil and David Cooke, formerly of Park Nicollet Health Systems. It’s great to hear how these companies are transforming into forward-looking, Future Ready organizations.

The conference’s theme is “Future Ready: Seeing through the Fog.” When I originally selected the title, I figured that we would be either be slogging thought a lingering recession or trying to see forward as we emerged from it. That foresight has turned out to be fairly close.

What I didn’t envision was that my coauthor, Steve Morlidge (with whom I am scheduled to jointly present both the opening presentation in Thursday and a three-hour workshop on Friday), would be stuck in the UK with thousands of other travelers. more