Strategy map : describing how the organization creates value
Our work with more than 300 organization has provided us with an extensive database of strategies, strategy map, and balanced scorecards. In addition, we have studied the state of knowledge in diverse management fields, including shareholder value, business and corporate strategy, customer management, product development and innovation, operations management, environmental management, social investment, human resource management, information technology management, culture, and leadership. From this experience and knowledge, we have learned how the balanced scorecard, initially proposed to improve the measurement of an organization’s intangible assets, can be a powerful tool describing and implementing an organization’s strategy. The four-perspective model for describing an organization’s value-creating strategy provides a language that executive teams can use to discuss the direction and priorities of their enterprises. They can view their strategic measures, not as performance indicators in four independent perspectives, but as a series of cause-and-effect linkages among objectives in the four balanced scorecard perspective. We facilitate the discussion among executives by creating a general representation of these linkages that we call a strategy map. We now realize that the strategy map, a visual representation of the cause-and-effect relationships among the components of an organization’s strategy, is as big an insight to executives as the balanced scorecard itself.