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Hope wrapped in Futility


If you are in the service business, or any for that matter, I am sure that you are successful as a result of looking at your operation across different perspectives.  Certainly understanding your financials, customer needs, how your organization is learning and growing, and internal process are amongst the top areas of reflection.  It has perplexed me for years, with the aforementioned logic, that not everyone is flocking towards strategy maps and balanced scorecards.  I would have to say that businesses perceive this process as over-complicated and in many instances justifiably so; however, the juice is definitely worth the squeeze (my experience conducting these sessions for service organizations has produced an average of two four hour meetings with your companies leadership, and about four hours of non-meeting work).



What are you talking about?  Strategy mapping and balanced scorecards is a process developed years ago by Doctors' Kaplan and Norton at Harvard University.  The balanced scorecard (BSC) is a strategy performance management tool – a semi-standard structured visualization, supported by design methods and automation tools, that are used by managers to keep track of the execution of activities by staff within their control and to monitor consequences arising from these actions. Essentially a vehicle to put strategy into action. Some critical characteristics that define BSC are:

  • it's focus on the strategic agenda of the organization
  • the selection of a small number of data items to monitor
  • a mix of financial and nonfinancial perspectives



You can easily do this on your own as I have over the years. Two books that you might find interesting, both published by Harvard business school, are "the balanced scorecard" and "alignment" (in that order).  It is next to impossible to get where you're going without some form of map, all other attempts are simply hope wrapped in futility.



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Next post:  people business, can I really get objective measurements?

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