"The achievements of an organization are the results of the combined effort of each individual." -Vince Lombardi

Since the opening ceremonies in London last week, I have been watching the Olympics almost every night while doing work or just unwinding from the day. As I'm sure many of you have noticed, and those who have participated in sports already know, it is amazing to witness the sense of teamwork among members of the Olympic teams. Each athlete is committed to giving their best for personal reasons, but also committed to winning for their country and their team as well. It is this same type of commitment that leaders and managers seek to build in their teams on daily basis.

A key concept in the "Balanced" Scorecard is the idea of "balance." As originally envisioned by Drs. Kaplan and Norton, balance meant that financial indicators should be balanced by customer, internal process, and learning and growth measures. But over the years, the idea of balance has grown to mean a lot more in the world of the Balanced Scorecard.

Employee evaluations have always been a pet peeve of mine. I hate giving them, I hate getting them (part of the reason I started Ascendant was so that I would no longer have to get an annual review), and I find them to have little to no value. They're either used to document behavior that's well understood or to create a paper trail to eventually terminate someone. And everyone is above average. So what's the point?

Twenty years ago, in 1992, Harvard Business Review published "Balanced Scorecard -- the Measures That Drive Performance." Seemingly obvious now, the article argued that companies need to measure more than just financial and operational measures to succeed. By looking at a "balanced scorecard" of financial, customer, process, and people measures, organization could more accurately understand the drivers of performance.

Jamie Dimon's testimony this week about how JP Morgan Chase ended up losing over $2B due to bad decisions compounded by bad decisions got me thinking about risk, risk management, and incentives. And how, at the end of the day, it's the incentives that matter.

Here at Ascendant, we're measurement geeks. We like things that can be quantified, explained, and analyzed. We like to understand what's driving behavior, and we like to say "what gets measured gets managed." So it's really interesting when we do work in healthcare and education. Because, despite the massive amount of measurement in both of those sectors, there's truly a paucity of management. Why is that?

For private sector organizations, it's usually pretty easy to figure out the ultimate measure of success -- it's usually some proxy for profitability -- either earnings per share, revenue growth, or share of market. But for the clients we work with, it's often a bit harder. While we can usually define the strategic objective pretty clearly, it's harder to define the measure behind it.

Helping a mission-driven organization develop its Balanced Scorecard and implement its strategy is always a long, arduous journey with its share of unique challenges. When you start with a division or region of a large organization that is trying to be the early adopter, additional challenges and question arise around the fact that very little, if any, guidance is given because the organization may not yet know the full rules of engagement.

Some leaders see this as a reason to go slow and be careful, while other--I would argue more visionary--leaders view it as an opportunity to blaze the trail and set the rules for others to follow. An additional level of complexity, and second-guessing, may be added if the organization is the largest multilateral development agency in the world. This interesting scenario is playing out right now with a client of ours, the World Bank.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution had a major story last Sunday on the apparent prevalence of cheating in major urban school districts across the country. This investigative article was spurned by work the AJC did in Atlanta -- under the premise if the results were too good to be true, they probably were. Unfortunately, cheating of the nature discovered in Atlanta and suspected around the country hurts those who can least afford to be hurt -- children with already marginal educational opportunities.

Let me quickly describe a dysfunctional organization. It is one whose leadership team meets on a regular basis. Maybe they meet weekly for 1 hour or monthly for 2-4 hours or even quarterly for 4-8 hours. They talk about all the things that are important to their organization. They discuss all of the challenges and successes. They fret over the complex and difficult issues, and then they break for the day and meet back again the next time. This might not seem all that unfamiliar to you.