The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action
Robert S. Kaplan, David P. NortonBooks.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Overview
Here is the book - by the recognized architects of the Balanced Scorecard - that shows how managers can use this revolutionary tool to mobilize their people to fulfill the company's mission. More than just a measurement system, the Balanced Scorecard is a management system that can channel the energies, abilities, and specific knowledge held by people throughout the organization toward achieving long-term strategic goals. Kaplan and Norton demonstrate how senior executives in industries such as banking, oil, insurance, and retailing are using the Balanced Scorecard both to guide current performance and to target future performance. They show how to use measures in four categories - financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth - to align individual, organizational, and cross-departmental initiatives and to identify entirely new processes for meeting customer and shareholder objectives. The authors also reveal how to use the Balanced Scorecard as a robust learning system for testing, gaining feedback on, and updating the organization's strategy. Finally, they walk through the steps that managers in any company can use to build their own Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard provides the management system for companies to invest in the long term - in customers, in employees, in new product development, and in systems - rather than managing the bottom line to pump up short-term earnings. It will change the way you measure and manage your business.
Aimed at managers, this books explains how to mobilize people to fulfill their company`s mission. It delves into business strategy measurement and management, and it details the four categories of the balanced scorecard: financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes and learning & growth. For added clarity, the book uses real life examples from various industries.
Synopsis
The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton provide the theoretical foundations for the Balanced Scorecard; in the second part, they describe the steps organizations must take to build their own Scorecards; and, finally, they discuss how the Balanced Scorecard can be used as a driver of change.
Publishers Weekly
As running a corporateor government or not-for-profitenterprise becomes increasingly complicated, more sophisticated approaches are needed to implement strategy and measure performance. Purely financial evaluations of performance, for example, no longer suffice in a world where intangible assetsrelationships and capabilitiesincreasingly determine the prospects for success. Kaplan, a Harvard Business School professor of accounting, and Norton, president of Renaissance Solutions, make a key contribution by describing and illustrating the balanced scorecard, a multidimensional approach to measuring corporate performance that incorporates both financial and non-financial factors. The concept of a balanced scorecard originated in a study group of 12 companies that met throughout 1990; since then, the authors have worked with several companies, including FMC Corporation, Brown & Root Energy Services, Mobil and CIGNA, to create scorecards and use them as a systematic means to implement new organizational strategy. Though still in the preliminary stages of development, balanced scorecards could represent the emergence of a new era of management sophistication, in which both the hard and soft variables of work life are taken into account in a rigorous, testable fashion. Kaplan and Norton provide an excellent, though dry, introduction to a new methodology of management. (Sept.)
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
Fatbrain Review
Aimed at managers, this books explains how to mobilize people to fulfill their company`s mission. It delves into business strategy measurement and management, and it details the four categories of the balanced scorecard: financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes and learning & growth. For added clarity, the book uses real life examples from various industries.
Highlights:
- Details the operating environment of the information age, which includes cross-functions, links to customers and suppliers, customer segmentation and innovation.
- Explains how to plan, set targets and align strategic initiatives.
- Illustrates innovative measurement practices from companies such as Rockwater, Metro Bank, Pioneer Petroleum, National Insurance and Kenyon Stores.
- You study revenue growth issues, including new products, applications, customers and markets.
- Explores revenue productivity, unit cost reduction and channel mix improvement.
- Describes the cash-to-cash cycle, asset utilization, and risk management objectives and measures.
Advantages:
- Utilizes tables, diagrams and charts to demonstrate points.
- The appendix details the process of building a balanced scorecard.
Related Titles:
For more information on business management, try Assessing Business Excellence : A Guide to Self-Assessment. For an in-depth look at individual company business strategies, check out