The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action [Hardcover]

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.

How to use measurement systems to implement strategy.
We originally developed the Balanced Scorecard to improve performance measurement systems. The Balanced Scorecard retains financial measures, such as return-on-capital-employed and economic value added, and supplements these with new measures on value creation for customers, enhancement of internal processes, including innovation, to deliver desired value propositions to targeted customers, and the creation of capabilities in employees and systems. As companies developed and used their Balanced Scorecard, they soon made it the centerpiece of their management systems. Innovating companies today are using their Balanced Scorecards to (1) gain consensus and clarity about their strategic objectives, (2) communicate strategic objectives to business units, departments, teams, and individuals, (3) align strategic planning, resource allocation and budgeting processes, and, (4) obtain feedback and learn about the effectiveness of their strategic plan and its implementation. The book describes, in detail, the construction and use of the Balanced Scorecard as a strategic management system. Detailed case studies of how Chemical Bank, Mobil, and United Way of Southeastern New England are using their Balanced Scorecards can be obtained from Harvard Business School Publishing (1-800-988-0886).

Robert S. Kaplan is the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at the Harvard Business School. David P. Norton is the president of Renaissance Solutions, Inc. They are the authors of three seminal Harvard Business Review articles on the Balanced Scorecard.