The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age

Strategy Maps

In the introduction to their book Strategy Maps,⁹² Kaplan and Norton write:

… the measurement system should focus on the entity’s strategy – how it expects to create future, sustainable value. In designing Balanced Scorecards, therefore, an organization must measure the critical few parameters that represent its strategy for long-term value creation.

… Without a comprehensive description of strategy, executives cannot easily communicate the strategy among themselves or to their employees. Without a shared understanding of the strategy, executives cannot create alignment around it. And, without alignment, executives cannot implement their new strategies …

And they summarize the purpose of strategy maps at the end of the second chapter:

The strategy map provides the visual framework for integrating the organization’s objectives in the four perspectives of a Balanced Scorecard. It illustrates the cause-and-effect relationships that link desired outcomes in the customer and financial perspectives to outstanding performance in critical internal processes – operations management, customer management, innovation, and regulatory and social processes. These critical processes create and deliver the organization’s value proposition to targeted customers and also promote the organization’s productivity objectives in the financial perspective. Further, the strategy map identifies the specific capabilities in the organization’s intangible assets – human capital, information ...