IDU NEWS

Budgets can be an opportunity for reflection on strategy and alignment

Empower them. If you want to track the rise and fall of buzzwords over time, the Google Books Ngram Viewer, which tracks word frequency in a vast number of books published since 1800, is a very useful tool. It reveals, for example, that while “accountability” has been consistently rising in popularity since 1950, “empowerment” only arrived on the scene in the mid-1970s, enjoyed a rapid rise and then plateaued in the late 1990s. That’s a pity, because at IDU we believe very s

Last year this time I wrote that you should take an entrepreneurial view of your organisation and start experimenting and breaking stuff. Why? Because if you don’t foster a culture of entrepreneurship and innovation, you’re going to get left behind. If you thought 2017 was fast-paced and disruptive, hold onto your seats as we enter 2018. Virtually every major industry is going to be shaken up by technology and what it enables. Not for its own sake, though, but because custome

Last week’s budget speech has been bugging us, there was a consistent vagueness to it all. There is a lack of certainty, a lack of tangible, measurable deliverables; in a word – a lack transparency. We have built our entire business on the importance of transparency. Not just sharing the facts with everybody, but ensuring they are able to understand how to work with and use the information provided to them. While this is not the worst budget we could have had by some way, it

Budgeting is one of the most crucial aspects of business planning, and yet too often it is not given the attention and input it deserves. If done right, budgeting can help you to prepare for most any eventuality, saving you time and money in the long run. Some of the most common mistakes we have come across in budgets are: Financial or department heads creating a number they feel “should cover it” and hoping for approval, as opposed to budget numbers being driven by the exper

It is all fine and well that you have embraced the shift in managing budgets by getting input from your staff from all levels of your organisation and it will undoubtedly ensure your budget and planning will be far more accurate and the staff will feel more empowered by their involvement. However, empowerment does not change the fact that your staff are busy with their day to day activities, ensuring the business is on track and growing, and you may face a few problems gettin

Some days it feels like there is a new story of bribery, corruption or nepotism in our papers every day, but this is the case wherever there is power in the hands of a few and little or no accountability. This is sadly not only rampant in governments everywhere, but in businesses as well. In both cases, the introduction of transparency into their financial transactions, from their budgets and forecasts to their reporting, can make the world of difference. Beyond making any an