Nils-Göran Olve, Carl-Johan Petri, Jan Roy, Sofie Roy
ISBN: 0-470-84871-5
Cloth
320 pages
January 2003

Since the groundbreaking work of Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton, the concept of the Balanced Scorecard has achieved increasing popularity in the business world. Previously, many organizations had built their business objectives around financial targets and goals that bore little relation to a long-term strategic vision. Typically, this leaves a gap between the development of a company's strategy and its implementation.

The business scorecard, however, provides a more 'balanced view' by looking at not just financial concerns, but also customers, internal business processes, and learning and growth. It is not just a system of performance measurement; by focusing on future potential success it can be used as a dynamic management system that reinforces, implements and drives corporate strategy forward. Following on from Performance Drivers this book focuses on the hands-on experiences of companies across a broad range of organizations at both operational and board level. The cases are drawn from UK, European US and Japanese companies and show that although the Balance Score Card has been widely adopted, it is practised in different forms and with varying degrees of success. The desired strategic control system using scorecards that is presented focuses on creating and communicating a total comprehensive picture to all members of the organization from the top down.

The book provides a long-term view of what the company's strategic objectives really are, how to make use of knowledge gained through experience and the required flexibility of such a system to cope with the fast-changing business environment. It also shows that the BSC is not a management fad but an important tool for realising the unseen wealth of companies, which at times of economic uncertainty could be mobilized to provide new revenues at low accounting cost.