Building on their earlier collaborative work in The Balanced Scorecard and the Strategy-Focused Organization , (Kaplan (leadership development, Harvard Business School) and Norton (president, Balanced Scorecard Collaborative) add the concept of "strategy maps" to their system of strategic management for business executives. Based on the idea that the results of strategy can't be measured without the strategy first being described and that strategy is easier to describe if it can be visualized, strategy maps are visualization tools for executives that are based on the principles that strategy: balances contradictory forces, is based on differentiating between value propositions required to please targeted customer segments, and recognizes that value is created through internal business processes. Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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More than a decade ago, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton introduced the Balanced Scorecard, a revolutionary performance measurement system that allowed organizations to quantify intangible assets such as people, information, and customer relationships. Then, in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton showed how organizations achieved breakthrough performance with a management system that put the Balanced Scorecard into action.Now, using their ongoing research with hundreds of Balanced Scorecard adopters across the globe, the authors have created a powerful new tool--the "strategy map"--that enables companies to describe the links between intangible assets and value creation with a clarity and precision never before possible. Kaplan and Norton argue that the most critical aspect of strategy--implementing it in a way that ensures sustained value creation--depends on managing four key internal processes: operations, customer relationships, innovation, and regulatory and social processes. The authors show how companies can use strategy maps to link those processes to desired outcomes; evaluate, measure, and improve the processes most critical to success; and target investments in human, informational, and organizational capital. Providing a visual "aha!" for executives everywhere who can't figure out why their strategy isn't working, Strategy Maps is a blueprint any organization can follow to align processes, people, and information technology for superior performance.
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