A reader comments about my blog "I wasn't in the room..."
"Executives are treating the financial element of the four as an outcome, rather than an essential and fairly equal indicator to the other three dimensions, we should agree that financial performance, over the course of developing the remaining tree elements should take a parallel growth, hence finance should become a forth indicator rather than an outcome"
I agree. In fact, how you describe the four perspectives was exactly the way how they were visualized in the original balanced scorecard between 1992-1996. Four perspectives grouped around the overall objectives. Then it changed, when the strategy maps came, and the perspectives were visualized as having cause-and-effect relationships. Growth/Learning is needed to keep your processes up to date, which leads to happy customers, and financial results are the outcome.
What I like better about the original visualization, is that the 4 perspectives can have conflicting requirements, instead of cause-and-effect relationships. There is a clear conflict between growth/learning and process, called "innovation vs optimization", or between financial and customer, called "value or profit".
Thinking about these conflicts is much more profound than figuring out the cause-and-effect relationships (if these even exist, instead of correlations). This is one of the main topics of the book I am currently working on. Interested? Check www.frankbuytendijk.com and take the survey.
frank
