| A Balanced Scorecard should not just be a collection of financial and non-financial measures, organized into three to five perspectives. A Balanced Scorecard reflects the strategy of an organization. A good test is whether you can understand the strategy by looking only at the ! scorecard. Many organizations, especially those that created constituent or stakeholder scorecards or Key Performance Indicator (KPI) Scorecard, fail this test. A Strategy Scorecard, along with graphical representations on strategy maps, provides a logical and comprehensive way to describe strategy. Both scorecards clearly communicate the organization's desired outcomes and its hypotheses about how these outcomes can be achieved. They generate all organizational units and employees to understand the strategy and identify how they can contribute by becoming aligned to the strategy. We do not claim to have made a science of strategy. The formulation of strategy is an art, and it will always remain as such. The description of strategy, however, should not be an art. If we can describe strategy in a more disciplined way, we will increase the likelihood of successful implementation. With a Balanced Scorecard that tells the story of the strategy, we now have a reliable foundation for the design of a management system to create strategy focused organizations. |