New White Paper:
Balanced Scorecard Assessments
Create a Better Strategic Management System by Diagnosing, Improving, & Evolving Your Scorecard
While Harvard Business School hails the Balanced Scorecard as one of the most influential ideas of the last 75 years, there are dark clouds on the horizon. According to work cited by Paul Niven, as many as half of all Balanced Scorecard initiatives are failing to produce their promised value. Does this signal the end of the Balanced Scorecard as a Performance Management tool? It should not — as this tool still remains one of the most powerful Performance Management tools available to senior leaders. Rather, this suggests that there is a wide variation in the definition and implementation of Balanced Scorecards.
Those who follow best practices, e.g. The Hackett Group, report that the tool still produces value and is in use by a large number of organizations. So, how do you fix an existing scorecard and get it back on track? The answer, as James Creelman suggests in the highlighted quote, is to ensure that your Balanced Scorecard is a strategic management system, not just a mixture of measures. While we outline a variety of steps for improving scorecards, strategy maps are critical to the transformation to or improvement of your Balanced Scorecard based strategic management system.
