Balanced Scorecards and Operational Dashboards with Microsoft Excel, 2nd Edition

Introduction

This book is a guide to how your organization can create a competitive advantage by successfully executing strategy and accelerating performance. You must begin with a vision held by and communicated through leadership to every employee. That vision is achieved when employees work in concert, knowing how they contribute to strategic success and operational performance. A Strategy Map and Balanced Scorecard are the tools you need to gather the information that shows you how you can achieve strategic success. Operational maps and operational dashboards are the tools and measures that show you how to accelerate operational success.

Since I wrote the first edition of this book, the world has undergone significant change. With continued globalization and the global recession, it’s even more apparent that winning organizations possess two attributes. They must be flexible enough to pivot in new directions, and they must focus on their core strategic strengths:

• Winning organizations continually monitor their performance and are willing to pivot with a better strategy. To monitor their performance, they need operational dashboards that measure the Critical Few operational metrics specific to their organization.
• Winning organizations must focus their people, processes, and technology. To do that, they need a Balanced Scorecard that helps the organization stay aligned with its core strategic strengths.

As I move between organizations of all types, I am continuously amazed ...