Thinkers 50 Management: Cutting Edge Thinking to Engage and Motivate Your Employees for Success

CHAPTER5

Measuring Performance

What’s measured gets done. Nowhere is this truer than in management. But what to measure? As we have seen, what managers do is cloaked in uncertainty and ambiguity. Financial measures are clearly vital but are only part of the story. In the 1990s, at the opposite extreme it was argued that intellectual capital should be considered the vital measure of corporate health. More recently, debates continue on social value as a key measure.

To take companies beyond the often limiting measurement of financial criteria, David Norton and Robert Kaplan developed the balanced scorecard, “a strategic management and measurement system that links strategic objectives to comprehensive indicators.” Norton is a cofounder of the consulting ...