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The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action (精装)
by Robert S. Kaplan, David P. Norton
| Category:
Management |
| Market price: ¥ 368.00
MSL price:
¥ 268.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
A thought provoking method to achieving strategic alignment and an effective way to overcome strategic communications stalls. |
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AllReviews |
1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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Michael Hammer (Author of Reengineering the Corporation) (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-02 00:00>
A landmark achievement. |
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Richard E. Cavanaugh (President of The Conference Board), USA
<2007-01-02 00:00>
Kaplan and Norton's pioneering The Balanced Scorecard is required reading for those who seek to measure and manage successful business strategy. A landmark in the art of management. |
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Manning (MSL quote), Australia
<2007-01-02 00:00>
Kaplan and Norton's book has become an industry standard, and deservedly so - effective implementation of a BSC is highly effective for an organization. The much-touted Six-Sigma program borrows very heavily from the ideas of Kaplan and Norton.
All of the other positive comments made by reviewers are valid, but my single criticism of this book is that it fails to adequately warn the reader of the tremendous technical issues that will arise when trying to actually source the data required. It's easy to put space for a statistic such as "customer satisfaction" into a scorecard, but actually determining that particular value implies an enormous amount of summarization of data from sales, complaints, returns, CRM and so on. Doing all of this requires many things to be accomplished beforehand, such as the standardization of business definitions (e.g. does each department use the same definition of "customer"? Without this consistency the statistic becomes meaningless).
If you are seriously investigating BSC as a management tool, you will need to get informed about Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence first. Without a firm foundation of low-level information integration and management, BSC just becomes another fluffy management gimmick. This is a shame, because it doesn't have to be that way - BSC can be incredibly valuable and efficient if implemented effectively.
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Michael Gering (MSL quote), South Africa
<2007-01-02 00:00>
Many organizations are in the process of implementing the “Balanced Scorecard,” yet some are struggling. Either they fail to implement the measures, or the measures fail to have the expected impact.
Organizations execute four 'mission critical' activities, for a scorecard to succeed. Each is more difficult than might appear and must be performed by a different part of the organization.
1. Articulating the strategy: Top management must articulate and disseminate the strategy. More than measuring success, a performance system communicates a strategy. Without a strategy, the performance measures become an "anything goes" exercise. "Anything goes in theory" means that "everything stays in practice."
2. Designing the measures: A core task team must design the measures to avoid uneconomic behavior. Poorly thought out measures create counter productive activity.
3. Operationalizing the measures: Once measures are defined, programmers operationalize and automate them.
Even revenue can be complicated in practice: When is it recorded, and what does it include. The task team may well find themselves getting what they asked for, and not what they wanted.
4. Getting the buy-in: Change management skills are needed to align the changes and create buy in. Dilbert cynically states that there are two steps to a great performance measurement system. 1) Gather information and 2) ignore it. For performance measurement to work, the system must be accepted, understood, and aligned to the reward.
The book, The Balanced Scorecard by Kaplan and Norton has become compulsory reading for middle management. It is very good, with the one weakness that it makes performance measurement look deceptively simple. |
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Donald Mitchell (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-02 00:00>
The Balanced Scorecard looks at the important issues of alignment, coordination, and effective implementation. Most business thinkers like to start with the big picture, and end there. As a result, most ideas for going in a new direction are quickly diluted by misunderstanding, falling back on old habits, and lethargy. Since Peter Drucker first popularized the idea of business strategy, there have been vastly more strategies conceived than there have been strategies successfully implemented as a result.
Much attention has been paid to devising better strategies in the last four decades, and little to implementing strategies. The big pay-off is in the implementation, and The Balanced Scorecard is one of handful of books that provide important and valuable guidance to explain what needs to be done to successfully execute strategy. You must have more measures, and different measures than the accounting system provides. You also need to link measures and compensation to the key tasks that each person must perform.
This book is simply the Rosetta Stone of communicating and managing strategy. The Balanced Scorecard is the beginning of the practical period of maturity in the field of business strategy. Read this book today to enjoy much more prosperity! I also recommend that you read The Fifth Discipline, The Fifth Discipline Handbook, and The Dance of Change to understand more about the context in which you are trying to make positive change. These four books are excellent companions for each other. |
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Robert Morris (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-02 00:00>
I read this book when it was first published (1996) and recently re-read it. As Kaplan and Norton explain in their Preface, "the Balanced Scorecard evolved from an improved measurement system to an improved management system." The distinction is critically important to understanding this book as well as The Strategy-Focused Organization which they later wrote. Senior executives in various companies have used the Balanced Scorecard as the central organizing framework for important managerial processes such as individual and team goal setting, compensation, resource allocation, budgeting and planning, and strategic feedback and learning. When writing this book, it was the authors' hope that the observations they share would help more executives to launch and implement Balanced Scorecard programs in their organizations.
The material is organized within two Parts, preceded by the excellent Preface and then two introductory chapters: "Measurement and Management in the Information Age" and "Why Does Business Need a Balanced Scorecard?" Logically, Part One examines measurement of business strategy; Part Two examines management of business strategy. Having read all of the 12 chapters, each concluded with a Summary of key points, readers are then provided with an Appendix: "Building a Balanced Scorecard." That process consists of a series of specific "tasks": (1) selection of the appropriate organizational unit, (2) identification of the SBU/corporate linkages, (3) completion of the first round of interviews during which key executives are briefed on the Balanced Scorecard program, (4) evaluation by the program's "architect" and other members of design team of feedback from various interviews, (5) conducting a "first round" workshop for the top management team, (6) conducting meetings during which the "architect" works with several subgroups, (7) conducting a "second round" workshop for members of the top management team, their direct subordinates, and an appropriate number of middle managers, (8) formulating the implementation plan, (9) conducting the "third round" workshop, and finally (10) Finalizing the implementation plan. Kaplan and Norton guide their reader through each stage of the process, suggesting all manner of strategies and tactics for consideration without inhibiting their reader from determining what is most appropriate for her or his own organization.
Although decision-makers in larger organizations will derive substantial benefit from this book, it would be a mistake to assume that the Balanced Scorecard would not be appropriate to small-to-midsize organizations. On the contrary, it may be even more valuable to them because they have relatively fewer resources available; therefore, the consequences of a failed strategy have greater (in some instances fatal) impact. The two concepts of "balance" and "scorecard" are critically important. All organizations must formulate and then effectively manage those strategies which enable them to achieve an appropriate balance of various resources while taking full advantage of measurement devices by which to obtain relevant as well as accurate and timely data for their strategies' scoreboard. Kaplan and Norton obviously have all this in mind when suggesting, in the Appendix, "core" measures for finance (e.g. ROI/EVA), customer relationships (e.g. customer retention), and learning and growth (e.g. employee satisfaction). Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to read Kaplan and Norton's sequel to it, The Strategy-Focused Organization. It continues their rigorous examination of what a Balanced Scoreboard can help all organizations to accomplish with effective management of a correct strategy. |
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Mike Tarrani (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-02 00:00>
This book is a seminal work that has significantly affected the way businesses frame and execute strategy.
In a nutshell, the authors show you how to view your business strategy, drivers and key indicators in four dimensions - financial, external (customer satisfaction), internal (processes) and learning/growth. They then show you how to link these to your strategies and develop and execute plan for transforming them into action and results.
The good and the bad. First, the good - before Kaplan and Norton published this book there was no standardized method for framing and measuring what's important. This book rectifies that. Also, the ideas first introduced have been embraced and extended to the point that a book search of similar titles returns over 2,600 hits, and a Google search using 'balanced scorecard' as a keyword returns ten time that many. This is a clear indication of how influential this book is and remains eight years after publication. But those are simple statistics. What's important about this book is many of the other resources that have sprung from it assume that you are familiar with the concepts and approach in this book.
The bad - the writing style, as noted by others is ponderous. That does not diminish the concepts and approach. It is also showing its age, but only because of the body of work that this book has inspired, which has greatly extended and refined the basic ideas. You will still need to read this book to get the most out of the body of work that is based upon it. Also note that even Kaplan and Norton, the authors, have extended this work into strategy maps and a 'strategy-focused organization' paradigm.
Overall this book has - and will continue to - influence thinking. The ideas set forth are still evolving and have been embraced by some of the largest (and smallest) companies on the planet. If you are new to this material I recommend visiting Balanced Scorecard Institute for introductory information, and Balanced Scorecard Online for more detailed material. |
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Simon Ferreira (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-02 00:00>
The balanced scorecard can be thought of as the "strategic chart of accounts" for an organization. It captures both the financial and the non- financial elements of a company's strategy and discusses the cause- and-effect relationships that drive business results. It allows, for the first time, an organization to look ahead - using leading indicators - instead of only looking back using lagging indicators. The balanced scorecard puts strategy - the key driver of results today - at the center of the management process. It’s an essential book of management. |
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1 Total 1 pages 8 items |
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