The Balanced Scorecard  (English, Hardcover, Kaplan Robert S.)

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.

About the Author
Robert Kaplan and David Norton are best known as the originators of the Balanced Scorecard, a strategic management tool that links a company's current actions with its long-term goals. The Balanced Scorecard is one of the most successful and widely used management tools in the world.

Kaplan is Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. Norton is the founder and director of The Palladium Group, the US based organizational strategy consultants.

Kaplan and Norton first brought the balanced scorecard to the attention of the managerial masses in their Harvard Business Review article, "The Balanced Scorecard—Measures that Drive Performance," (1992). Since then, they have written numerous books together focusing on aspects of the balanced scorecard concept. These include The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action (1996); The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment (2000); and Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies (2006).

Their most recent book is Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage (2008).

As well as the Balanced Scorecard, Kaplan co-developed the concept of activity based costing, and is currently applying this approach to health care with his Harvard colleague, Michael Porter (see their article, “How to Solve the Cost Crisis Health Care,” in September 2011 Harvard Business Review).

Table of Contents
Preface
1. Measurement and Management in the Information Age
2. Why Does Business Need a Balanced Scorecard?
Part One: Measuring Business Strategy
3. Financial Perspective
4. Customer Perspective
5. Internal-Business-Process Perspective
6. Learning and Growth Perspective
7. Linking Balanced Scorecard Measures to Your Strategy
8. Structure and Strategy
Part Two: Managing Business Strategy
9. Achieving Strategic Alignment: From Top to Bottom
10. Targets, Resource Allocation Learning Process
11. Implementing a Balanced Scorecard Management Program
Appendix: Building a Balanced Scorecard
Index
About the Authors