The Balanced Scorecard

Here is the book — by the recognized architects of the Balanced Scorecard — that shows how managers can use this revolutionary tool to mobilize their people to fulfill the company's mission. More than just a measurement system, the Balanced Scorecard is a management system that can channel the energies, abilities, and specific knowledge held by people throughout the organization toward achieving long-term strategic goals.

Kaplan and Norton demonstrate how senior executives in industries such as banking, oil, insurance, and retailing are using the Balanced Scorecard both to guide current performance and to target future performance. They show how to use measures in four categories-financial performance, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth-to align individual, organizational, and cross-departmental initiatives and to identify entirely new processes for meeting customer and shareholder objectives.

The authors also reveal how to use the Balanced Scorecard as a robust learning system for testing, gaining feedback on, and updating the organization's strategy. Finally, they walk through the steps that managers in any company can use to build their own Balanced Scorecard.

The Balanced Scorecard provides the management system for companies to invest in the long term-in customers, in employees, in new product development, and in systems-rather than managing the bottom line to pump up short-term earnings. It will change the way you measure and manage your business.

1. Measurement and Management in the Information Age
2. Why Does Business Need a Balanced Scorecard?
• Part One: Measuring Business Strategy
1. Financial Perspective
2. Customer Perspective
3. Internal-Business-Process Perspective
4. Learning and Growth Perspective
5. Linking Balanced Scorecard Measures to Your Strategy
6. Structure and Strategy
• Part Two: Managing Business Strategy
1. Achieving Strategic Alignment: From Top to Bottom
2. Targets, Resource Allocation, Initiatives, and Budgets
3. Feedback and the Strategic Learning Process
4. Implementing a Balanced Scorecard Management Program
5. Appendix: Building a Balanced Scorecard

A classical book, that still is valid and widely used. In fact, it is the fore-runner to the nowadays very popular Six Sigma craze, but without the Manufacturing focus of that model.

It can be criticized for being more of a consult-manual, than a text-book, so if you are looking for a fix-it-all book, look elsewhere, as you need to be able to have independent thoughts while reading the (admittedly horridly written) text.