Robert S Kaplan

Biography

Robert S. Kaplan is Baker Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School. Kaplan joined the HBS faculty in 1984 after spending 16 years on the faculty of the business school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he served as Dean from 1977 to 1983. Kaplan received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University. He has received honorary doctorates from the University of Stuttgart and University of Lodz.

Research

Kaplan’s research, Executive Education teaching, and consulting focus on linking cost and performance management systems to strategy implementation and operational excellence. He has been a co-developer of both activity-based costing and the Balanced Scorecard.

Publications

He has authored or co-authored 14 books, 17 Harvard Business Review articles, and more than 120 other papers. Recent books include The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, his fifth Balanced Scorecard book co-authored with David Norton, and Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing with Steve Anderson. His previous books with Norton include Alignment, Strategy Maps, named as one of the top ten business books of 2004 by Strategy & Business and amazon.com, The Strategy-Focused Organization, named by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young as the best international business book for year 2000, and The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, which has been translated into 22 languages and won the 2001 Wildman Medal from the American Accounting Association for its impact on practice. He also co-authored Cost and Effect, Implementing Activity-Based Cost Management, and Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, which received the American Accounting Association Seminal Contributions to Literature Award in 2007.

Awards

In 2006, Kaplan was elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame, and received the Lifetime Contribution Award from the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association (AAA). In December 2004, he received the Telecom Italia "Prize for Leadership on Business and Economic Thinking." The Financial Times included him in its 2005 list of Top 25 Business Thinkers. The Accenture Institute for Strategic Change named him, in 2002 and 2003, among the Top 50 Thinkers and Writers on Management Topics. Kaplan received the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1988 from the AAA, the 1994 CIMA Award from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK) for "Outstanding Contributions to the Accountancy Profession," and the 2001 Distinguished Service Award from the Institute of Management Accountants (IMA) for contributions to the practice and academic community.

Board Membership

Kaplan speaks on performance and cost management systems in North and South America, Europe, Middle East, South Africa, Asia, and Australia/New Zealand. He is chairman of the Practice Leadership Committee of The Palladium Group and currently serves on the boards of Evergreen Energy, Acorn Systems, and the Technion Institute of Management.