Svenska Handelsbanken: Controlling a Radically Decentralized Organization without Budgets

Svenska Handelsbanken was the large national Swedish bank that provided the exemplar case for the idea that organizations could abandon budgets and operate successfully, or perhaps operate even more successfully, without them. In this case, Nancy Cartwright, a senior executive in a large Canadian financial services corporation, had just been introduced to the Handelsbanken case and the Beyond Budgeting idea. She was intrigued by the idea that companies could abandon budgets while implementing a new more decentralized model of management control. She wondered whether these ideas could work beyond Handelsbanken and, in particular, outside of Scandinavia.