Top down means that the targets are also set from the whole to the part—that is, for the business as a whole, with subsets for its various components. Too many companies do it the other way around, using the budgeting process to get plans from the various levels of each business and then assembling them into a whole. This creates a lot of wasted effort, since the numbers have to be redone again and again as people negotiate them. This one-page financial overview includes pieces of information not usually included in the operations review: productivity, a census of employees, the investments
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