Balanced Scorecard Evolution: A Dynamic Approach to Strategy Execution

CHAPTER 1 What Exactly Is a Balanced Scorecard?

ORIGINS, AND A BRIEF HISTORY, OF THE BALANCED SCORECARD

Although its conceptual roots run deep, through work conducted by management thinkers and practitioners from Peter Drucker to Abraham Maslow, including French accounting scholars who developed a similar approach in the 1930s, the Balanced Scorecard as we know it today was invented by two men, Robert Kaplan and David Norton.

The world was introduced to the concept in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article, “The Balanced Scorecard—Measures that Drive Performance.”¹ That article was based on a research project conducted by Norton's consulting firm, which studied performance measurement in companies whose value creation was highly dependent on intangible assets.² As strident advocates for the power of measurement to drive focus and accountability, Kaplan and Norton were convinced that if organizations were to derive the maximum value from their investments in intangible assets, those same intangibles had to be integrated into their measurement systems. At the time, virtually all organizations were measuring financial results, and many were also collecting data on generic customer metrics, such as satisfaction and market share, along with measures of quality and efficiency. With the inclusion of measures tracking intangible assets such as employee skills and engagement, it appeared that management could now confidently cover their measurement bases.

A significant problem existed, ...