The Balanced Scorecard

Translating Strategy into Action

Here is the book--by the recognized architects of the Balanced Scorecard--that shows how managers can use this revolutionary tool to mobilize their people to fulfill the company's mission. More than just a measurement system, the Balanced Scorecard is a management system that can channel the energies, abilities, and specific knowledge held by people throughout the organization toward achieving long-term strategic goals.

Kaplan and Norton demonstrate how senior executives in industries such as banking, oil, insurance, and retailing are using the Balanced Scorecard both to guide current performance and to target future performance. They show how to use measures in four categories-financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth-to align individual, organizational, and cross-departmental initiatives and to identify entirely new processes for meeting customer and shareholder objectives.

The authors also reveal how to use the Balanced Scorecard as a robust learning system for testing, gaining feedback on, and updating the organization's strategy. Finally, they walk through the steps that managers in any company can use to build their own Balanced Scorecard. The Balanced Scorecard provides the management system for companies to invest in the long term-in customers, in employees, in new product development, and in systems-rather than managing the bottom line to pump up short-term earnings. It will change the way you measure and manage your business.

About the Author

Robert S. Kaplan, Senior Fellow and Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School, is co-developer of both activity-based costing (ABC) and the Balanced Scorecard (BSC). 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's research, executive program teaching, and consulting focus on aligning cost and performance management systems to strategy execution. He currently works with Michael Porter on the HBS Value Based Health Care initiative to introduce time-driven activity-based costing (TDABC) and value-based bundled payments to health care. The goal is to motivate the health care sector to restructure around delivering superior patient outcomes at significantly lower total cost. Another current project applies his strategy execution framework to help corporations create new regional ecosystems for inclusive growth. The strategies are designed to generate strong financial returns while transforming the socio-economic conditions of residents in low-income communities around the world. With Anette Mikes, he continues research and writing on new frameworks for implementing enterprise risk management.

Kaplan has authored or co-authored 14 books and more than 175 papers including 26 in Harvard Business Review. He has co-authored five books with David P. Norton: The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, 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 24 languages and won the 2001 Wildman Medal from the American Accounting Association (AAA) for its impact on practice. He also co-authored Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing with Steve Anderson, Cost and Effect and Implementing Activity-Based Cost Management with Robin Cooper, and Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, with H. Thomas Johnson, which received the AAA Seminal Contributions to Literature Award in 2007.

Kaplan received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University, and honorary doctorates from several international universities. Elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2006, he received the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1988 from the AAA, the 1994 CIMA Award from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK), and Lifetime Contribution Awards from the Management Accounting Section of the AAA (2006) and the Institute of Management Accountants (2008). He continues to be a leading global speaker on strategy execution, and cost and performance management.

David Norton is a financial management guru and founder of the Palladium Group. He is also is one of the co-founders of the famous Balanced Scorecard model. David Norton began his academic career at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. There, he obtained his BSc. Degree in Electrical Engineering. He obtained an MSc. in operations research from the Florida Institute of technology, an MBA from Florida State University and a doctorate in business administration from Harvard Business School. David Norton ’s best-known works is his contribution to the Balanced Scorecard model which he co-developed with Robert Kaplan. In addition to his research work and lecturing, he has written numerous papers about the Balanced Scorecard model.

With Robert Kaplan, he co-authored eight articles that were published in Harvard Business Review (HBR) and six books, the most recent one of which is Digital Context 2.0: Seven Lessons in Business Strategy, Consumer Behavior, and the Internet of Things (2016). His books have sold more than one million copies in 23 languages. David Norton was voted as one of the world’s 12 most influential thinkers by “Sun Top Media Thinkers 50” in 2007. In 2008, David Norton and Robert Kaplan received the “Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance Award” from the the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD). The Balanced Scorecard concept was selected by the editors of the Harvard Business Review as one of the most influential management ideas of the past 75 years.