Alignment

Is every part of your organization marching in the strategic direction you've defined?

Most organizations contain multiple business and support units, each led by highly trained, experienced executives and staffed by talented employees. But too often, different units fail to coordinate: they work at cross-purposes and have conflicting goals. Results? Performance-sapping disagreements, lost opportunities, wasted resources — and a corporation whose value amount to less than the sum of its parts.

Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton explain how to correct such organizational misalignment — not only within a company but betwen the firm and its board of directors, investors, customers, and suppliers.

The authors maintain that the responsibility for organizational alignment lies with corporate headquarters. They show how top executives can build a corporate-level strategy map and scorecard that graphically depict their company's "enterprise value proposition" — how the organization creates synergies from its business units — and use the revolutionary Balanced Scorecard management system to set, coordinate, and oversee implementation of high-level strategy.

A wealth of case studies, actionable frameworks, and sample strategy maps and scorecards from actual companies reveal how business leaders can use the Balanced Scorecard to ensure that all parts of their organization are working in concert toward the same strategic end.

Alignment provides an array of potent practices — including:

• Ways to leverage financial synergies across a diverse corporate portfolio — for instance, through effective monitoring and resource-allocation processes
• Methods for encouraging the cross-selling of products and services to create unique solutions for customers shard among multiple business units
• Techniques for sharing common processes among units to gain economics of scale and capture specialized knowledge and expertise

The next breakthrough in stragey execution from the field's premier thiners, Alignment shows how today's companies can liberat unrealized value through enterprise synergies — and channel that value into stellar performance.

1. Alignment: A Source of Economic Value
2. Corporate Strategy and Structure: Historical Perspective
3. Aligning Financial and Customer Strategies
4. Aligning Internal Process and Learing and Growth Strategies: Integrated Strategic Themes
5. Aligning Support Functions
6. Cascading: The Process
7. Aligning Boards and Investors
8. Aligning External Partners
9. Managing the Alignment Process
10. Total Strategic Alignment

Continuation of BSC.

Well, when you write the fourth part of a successful series, you can be excused if you get a bit repetitive. This is a good book, but only if you already know BSC and Strategy Maps.

What it isn't, is a revolution or even thought-provoking. It spells out logical next steps in the BSC process, and does it very well.

For the convert (which includes me :-))