Framework for Judging Performance and Facilitating
Learning
Budgets enable a company’s managers to measure actual performance against predicted
performance. Budgets can overcome two limitations of using past performance as a basis
for judging actual results. One limitation is that past results often incorporate past miscues
and substandard performance. Consider a cellular telephone company (Mobile
Communications) examining the current-year (2012) performance of its sales force.
Suppose the performance for 2011 incorporated the efforts of many salespeople who have
since left Mobile because they did not have a good understanding of the marketplace. (The
president of Mobile said, “They could not sell ice cream in a heat wave.”) Using the sales
record of those departed employees would set the performance bar for 2012 much too low.
The other limitation of using past performance is that future conditions can be
expected to differ from the past. Consider again Mobile Communications. Suppose, in
2012, Mobile had a 20% revenue increase, compared with a 10% revenue increase in
2011. Does this increase indicate outstanding sales performance? Before you say yes, consider
the following facts. In November 2011, an industry trade association forecasts that
the 2012 growth rate in industry revenues will be 40%, which also turned out to be the
actual growth rate. As a result, Mobile’s 20% actual revenue gain in 2012 takes on a negative
connotation, even though it exceeded the 2011 actual growth rate of 10%. Using the
40% budgeted sales growth rate provides a better measure of the 2012 sales performance
than using the 2011 actual growth rate of 10%.
It is important to remember that a company’s budget should not be the only benchmark
used to evaluate performance. Many companies also consider performance relative
to peers as well as improvement over prior years. The problem with evaluating performance
relative only to a budget is it creates an incentive for subordinates to set a target that
is relatively easy to achieve.2 Of course, managers at all levels recognize this incentive, and
therefore work to make the budget more challenging to achieve for the individuals who
report to them. Negotiations occur among managers at each of these levels to understand
what is possible and what is not. The budget is the end product of these negotiations.
One of the most valuable benefits of budgeting is that it helps managers gather relevant
information for improving future performance. When actual outcomes fall short of
budgeted or planned results, it prompts thoughtful senior managers to ask questions
about what happened and why, and how this knowledge can be used to ensure that such
shortfalls do not occur again. This probing and learning is one of the most important reasons
why budgeting helps improve performance.