The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action

The Balanced Scorecard translates a company's vision and strategy into a coherent set of performance measures. The four perspectives of the scorecard--financial measures, customer knowledge, internal business processes, and learning and growth--offer a balance between short-term and long-term objectives, between outcomes desired and performance drivers of those outcomes, and between hard objective measures and softer, more subjective measures. In the first part, Kaplan and Norton provide the theoretical foundations for the Balanced Scorecard; in the second part, they describe the steps organizations must take to build their own Scorecards; and, finally, they discuss how the Balanced Scorecard can be used as a driver of change.

Robert S. Kaplan is the Arthur Lowes Dickinson Professor of Accounting at the Harvard Business School. David P. Norton is the president of Renaissance Solutions, Inc. They are the authors of three seminal Harvard Business Review articles on the Balanced Scorecard.