Looks at the concept of 'The Balanced Scorecard'. This book describes how organizations have developed a set of strategic operating procedures and philosophies to meet the demands of a business environment. This is an approach to management that provides translates a strategy into a language that can be acted upon from the bottom-up, not top-down.
Most organisations consist of multiple business and support units, each populated by highly trained, experienced executives. But often the efforts of individual units are not coordinated, resulting in conflicts, lost opportunities, and diminished performance. This work argues that the responsibility for this alignment lies with the headquarters.
In a world of stiffening competition, business strategy is more crucial than ever. Yet most organizations struggle in this area - not with formulating strategy but with executing it, or putting their strategy into action. This book describes a multistage system that enables you to gain benefits from your carefully formulated business strategy.
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.
