The Balanced Scorecard as a Framework for Strategic Action

Abstract

The professor Robert Kaplan and consultant David Norton proposed the Balanced Scorecard nineteen years ago. From that time, the concept has been adopted by all sorts of organizations - manufacturing and services, for-profit and nonprofit, public and private - in almost all developed and developing nations in the world. During this period, the Balanced Scorecard has evolved from its original purpose as an improved system of performance measurement to become the basis of a new management system that aligns and focuses the organization on actions meant to establish and refine their strategy. This evolution and refinement of the concept of the Balanced Scorecard have been documented by Kaplan and Norton in additional articles in the Harvard Business Review at Harvard University and in several books. But because of the changes that have occurred over the past nineteen years, we seek to highlight the current state of the art and to explain how to become an organization focused on strategy using the Balanced Scorecard. To this end, we review the Scorecard’s literature in recent years, to understand the extent of these applications and the interdependence between tangible and intangible resources, considering not only the performance of the company at one point in time, but its time path and system dynamics.