Collaborative budgeting model for CEO and senior leadership
A CEO's budget, rebuilt from top-down directive to shared ownership
About
KNK Group is the only Microsoft-certified provider of publishing software worldwide — headquartered in Kiel, with teams across Germany, the US, UK and France, serving over 450 publishing and media customers across three continents. For 30+ years it has combined management-consultancy DNA with deep technical capability.
Challenge
For three decades KNK ran a command-and-control budgeting model inherited from its consulting roots: leadership built the annual budget in isolation, then presented it. That worked at smaller scale — but as the company grew across continents and lines of business, the gap between strategic intent and operational reality widened, and budget became a one-way directive rather than a shared commitment.
Solution
Designed a fundamentally different model that flipped the power dynamic. Instead of top-down allocation, the CEO and senior leadership co-created the budget through a game-based process using symbolic tokens — a transparent mechanism that let every leader see, in real time, how their requests competed for resources. Assumptions surfaced early, constraints became explicit, and the final budget reflected collective intelligence rather than one person's guesses.
Outcome
The leadership team moved from inheriting a budget to building it together — turning the annual plan into a shared commitment rather than a top-down directive, and giving the CEO a decision model the team owned.
He didn't modernise the spreadsheet — he changed how the CEO's team makes decisions together.
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