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Without doubt Robert Kaplan has been, in the last decade, and continues to be the most influential thinker in the field of performance management, and his Balanced Scorecard is the most successful concept in this field. The article is a summary of an interview with Robert Kaplan, co‐author of The Balanced Scorecard, Translating Strategy into Action (Harvard Business School Press, 1996). The Balanced Scorecard, measures that drive performance (Harvard Business Review, January/February 1992) and The strategy‐focused organization, how balanced scorecard companies thrive in the new business environment (Harvard Business School Press, 2000).

This article presents an interview with Dr. Robert S. Kaplan and Dr. David P. Norton.

Kaplan and Norton answer questions about their book Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies.

Kaplan and Norton discuss the ideas in their book.

This interview provides useful insights into Kaplan and Norton's book.

Three recent publications by noted authors offer valuable insights into the new directions that leadership development thinking and practice now need to take, with all of three books placing particular emphasis on the importance of character, identity and values, not just competence.

Organizational psychologist Fred Kiel’s book, Return On Character sets out to show that the strength of a leader’s character is an important driver of business success and to examine the implications for leadership development. Discover Your True North by Harvard professor and former CEO of Medtronic Bill George examines why the self-development process of discovering one’s core values and passion (authenticity) to lead is essential to becoming an engaging and empowering leader. The theme of leadership as a life-long developmental challenge is Robert Kaplan’s primary focus in What You Really Need to Lead.

Kiel’s data revealed a clear relationship between the strength of a leader’s character and demonstrated mastery of these key skills, with virtuosos “consistently” outperforming their more self-focused peers.

One of the reasons that character matters is that leaders who more consciously and persistently search for greater self-awareness over the course of their careers tend to become ever more capable of questioning “not only the ideas of others” but even their “own most cherished beliefs,” and as a result, their understanding of their life, their business, their marketplace, and the global forces that shape them “enters a state of continual growth and development.”

The purpose of this paper is to provide the author's insights about five papers written in this volume about his published work on the balanced scorecard (BSC).

The author's comments are based on his personal writing, teaching, speaking about, and implementing the BSC during the past 20 years.

The author finds that academic commentary on the BSC often ignores its role in strategy execution.

The commentary is unique to the author's personal experiences and may not be generalizable to other scholars who have not shared the same experiences.

The paper may help scholars better understand the role of the BSC for strategy formulation, communication and implementation. It may also aid them in teaching the BSC to students and executives.

The paper discusses how the BSC can be used in public sector applications, as well as for companies that want to internalize environmental, social and community objectives in their strategies.

The paper reflects the personal views of the author; it is original to him.

The Planning Forum's Annual Conference in Washington, D.C. posted another attendance record. Some 1300 senior executives exchanged war stories, business theories, and points of view with each other while attending three days of presentations by major company CEOs, consultants to leading corporations, noted academics, and practitioners of strategic management.

To develop and apply the social enterprise balanced scorecard (SEBS) as an amended balanced scorecard technique for use evaluating UK social enterprises.

The study involved exploring the potential mainstream application of the balanced scorecard in UK social enterprises to learn how this process show the ways in which social enterprises can develop, and implement and track the performance of their socially driven strategies. Describes the development of an SEBS and its testing by 12 social enterprises in a pilot training programme (August 2004‐December 2004).

The results indicated that the SEBS had changed participant views about their organizations in terms of: increased employee understanding about their organization as a business; the usefulness as a business planning tool for social enterprises; the natural fit of the SEBS alongside the existing UK quality accreditation scheme of Investors In People; the power of the SEBS to be an effective means to engage staff and team members as an early‐warning system for potential problems; helping to redress the balance between purely financial gains and social purpose; and providing focus, clarity, and the ability to remove non‐essential detail from strategic planning. Concludes that: Kaplan and Norton’s balanced scorecard is capable of being adapted to suit social enterprises; positive outcomes include creating a common language through which social entrepreneurs can share and compare experience, even if they operate in different industries; and the application of the SEBS can enable organizations to become better businesses, while demonstrating social value added to stakeholders.

Reveals the benefits of extending the balanced scorecard approach to the evaluation of social enterprises.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of organizational culture as a company migrates through a four-stage model for designing a performance measurement system (PMS) focused on customer profitability.

This is a single-site phenomenological case study, at Growth Spurt Marine Accessories (Growth Spurt), a manufacturing organization headquartered in the USA. Data were collected over a two-year period through interviews with accounting staff, internal company documents and recording observational notes.

The paper identifies three major factors that prevented Growth Spurt from transitioning its customer profitability analysis (CPA) reporting package through Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model of PMS design: executives exerting their power and spending political capital to prevent implementation without providing rationale, executives believing that the allocation methods were too subjective and executives relying on their own intuition in analyzing customer profitability rather than relying on data. These factors suggest that organizational culture plays an important role in migrating a customer-focused profitability PMS through Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model of PMS system design.

The findings suggest that a PMS focused on customer profitability that does not advance beyond Stage II (financial reporting-driven) may still suit the needs of an organization. Additionally, managers should advocate for a multidisciplinary PMS design and implementation team to minimize potentially adverse effects of organizational culture.

This paper is unique because it applies Kaplan and Cooper’s four-stage model for PMS design to CPA and it uses a phenomenological case approach to explore impediments to a comprehensive CPA implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to create a model called “Balanced score for the balanced score card” and to provide an objective benchmarking indicator for evaluating the achievement of the strategic goals of the company.

The paper uses the concepts of “Balanced scorecard” proposed by Robert. S. Kaplan and David P. Norton. This paper also adopts the model given by Brown P.A. and Gibson D.F. and the extension to the model provided by P.V. Raghavan and M. Punniyamoorthy. Preference theory is used to calculate the relative weightage for each factor, using the process of pair wise comparison. The balanced score for balanced scorecard provides a single value by taking into account all the essential objective and subjective factors – be it financial or non‐financial. It also provides a suitable weightages for those parameters. The target performance and the actual performance are compared and the analysis is made.

Information from a leading organization was obtained and the balanced score for a balance scorecard was calculated for that organization. The variations were analyzed through this model. The depth and objectivity in the analysis is highlighted.

This provides a single bench marking measure to evaluate how far the firm had been successful in achieving the strategies. The paper has adopted the preference theory which limits the weightage to be accorded to the factors concerned. However, further refinement can be provided by the usage of analytic hierarchy process for arriving suitable weightages.

The organization can calculate the balanced score by themselves, by assigning appropriate importance to the activities – as they deem fit. It is a tailor made benchmarking information system created by the firm for itself.

This is of value to the top management to identify the important activities and setting suitable target measures to be achieved in those activities. The variations are arrived by comparing the targeted performance with the actual. This will help the firm to take suitable actions under those parameters where there are significant deviations.

In the early industrial age which with high intensity of machine and labor, using financial measurement index was good enough to tie in company’s mechanization and philosophy of management and been in efficiency. But being comply with “New Economic age,” a new economic environment is full of knowledge and information, the enterprise competition had changed from tangible assets, plants to intangible innovation ability of knowledge. As recognizing the new tendency by enterprise, they value gradually the growth and influence from learning. Practice of organization learning not only needs firm structure and be in coordination with both hardware and software, but also needs an affect measurement model to offer enterprise to estimate learning performance. It’s a good instrument of financial performance measure mold in the past years, But it’s for measuring the past, couldn’t formulate enterprise trend to future, hard to estimate investment for future, such as development of products, organization learning, knowledge management etc, as which intangible assets and knowledge ability just the key factors of being win around competition environment in the future. In 1992, Kaplan and Norton brought up Balance Scorecard (BSC) on Harvard Business Review, as an instrument helping enterprise to measure performance, which is being considered to be a most influence management instrument. It added non‐financial index such as customer, internal process and learning growth besides traditional financial index, as offering enterprise an index to measure and manage intangible assets and intellectual property. As being aware of organization learning is hard to be ignored in the new economic age, this research is based on learning and growth of BSC, and citing one national material company try to let the most difficult measurement performance of organization learning, to be estimate through BSC, analyze of factor and individual case, to discuss the company how to make the related strategy and vision of organization learning to develop learning and growth of the structure of BSC, subject the matter of out put factors to be discussed, and measure the outcomes as a result of research. The research affect offers (1) the base implement procedure of carrying out BSC; (2) the reference of formulating measurement index while enterprise using BSC to estimate performance of organization learning; (3) the possibility bottleneck maybe forcing while carrying out BSC, to be an improvement or preventive for enterprise.