Balanced Scorecards and Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel, 2nd Edition

Chapter 4

Step-by-Step to Building Your Strategy Map

Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.

—John F. Kennedy

U.S. President

1917–1963

You know where you want to go. You’ve completed your vision and Strategic Destination Statement, and now you face translating your strategy into action. The first step is to create a Strategy Map.

Without a Strategy Map, your Balanced Scorecard will be an executive scorecard. It will report on measures important to the executive, but it will not give you an accurate view of how the entire organization is driving and succeeding at its Strategic Objectives.

There are four reasons you need to create a Strategy Map even if you never build a Balanced Scorecard. First, early versions of Balanced Scorecards had a low success rate because the metrics they monitored were often chosen from the metrics currently in use, which may not have been the metrics that drove strategy. Second, in most organizations, few managers and employees have a clear and concise concept of their organization’s strategy. In fact, research shows that less than 10 percent of employees have a clear understanding of their organization’s strategy, and 50 percent of executives spend virtually no time on strategic discussion.1 Third, without a clear, concise model of what drives your strategy, you have no feedback about which drivers are working and which are not. Finally, when the objectives on the Strategy Map are broken into ...