Balanced Scorecard

Translating strategy into action
by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

After Management by Objectives, the next powerful management tool is balanced scorecard.

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.