I send my organization’s proposed annual budget to the board today. It’s an annual rite of passage, the budget process. Thinking about it makes me a little nostalgic.
I remember the feeling I got the first time I was trusted with a set of financial statements. Green and white lined sheets, printed out on a wide carriage dot matrix printer (ok, it was a long time ago…). The sense that somehow, encoded in these pages was the secret to running an efficient, effective organization. I still feel this way.
Financial statements will speak to you if you sit down with them and listen carefully. Yes, they can bring bad news. But they also can – in a very ordered way – speak quietly of new ways to see old challenges, unexpected solutions to things that have kept you awake at two in the morning.
Today we print financials on plain white paper, eight and a half by eleven. I wonder if they hold the same magic for new managers that those big green and white sheets did for me twenty years ago.
