Managing with the Balanced Scorecard
Building a Balanced Scorecard is fun. We have been helping organizations determine what their strategy map, measures, and initiatives are for over 10 years. The process and the product are both enjoyable. Imagine spending time waxing on about your strategy and your objectives. Looking at your past performance and pondering the future opportunities. Your leadership team then gets together to debate the one-page view of your strategy, the strategy map, as Norton and Kaplan call it. This is fun stuff.
The real challenge is what to do after you have built your Balanced Scorecard. Many leadership teams will talk about the value they received during the "construction" phase of work, but if you stop there, you will fall short of the true benefits of the BSC. Organizations should begin the process of managing their strategy. Some people think that producing an annual report based on their Balanced Scorecard measures is the next logical step. This report many times is given to the board of directors or submitted to a committee of the board. I would argue that this is called reporting and not managing.
Managing with the Balanced Scorecard means that on a regular basis, the leadership team of an organization creates and looks at the information in a Balanced Scorecard, discusses what it means, what the impact is on the organization, and what actions should be taken as a result. This is a lot of work. With this work comes a reward. Members of your organization's leadership start acting like a team and have a good command of all of the components of the organization, not just their silo. Adjustments are made throughout the year, rather than just at budget time. The organization begins driving results, not just reacting to them. Meetings not only become interesting, they become important.
In the next few posts, I'll talk about some of the components of managing your strategy, and I don't want to discount the fact that building a scorecard is important. It is the first step. You just must not forget that there are several steps in the process.
October 2009
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Then start getting your leaders to ask their direct staff how they contribute to the strategy. People start paying a lot more attention if their boss is comfortable with the framework and seems to be paying attention.