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Having Trouble with Your Strategy? Then Map It

by Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton

If you were a military general on the march, you'd want your troops to have plenty of maps - detailed information about the mission they were on, the roads they would travel, the campaigns they would undertake, and the weapons at their disposal. The same holds true in business: a workforce needs clear and detailed information to execute a business strategy successfully.

Until now, there haven't been many tools that can communicate both an organization's strategy and the processes and systems needed to implement that strategy. But authors Robert Kaplan and David Norton, co-creators of the balanced scorecard, have adapted that seminal tool to create strategy maps. Strategy maps let an organization describe and illustrate - in clear and general language - its objectives, initiatives, target markets, performance measures, and the links between all the pieces of its strategy. Employees get a visual representation of how their jobs are tied to the company's overall goals, while managers get a clearer understanding of their strategies and a means to detect and correct any flaws in those plans.

Using Mobil North American Marketing and Refining Company as an example, Kaplan and Norton walk through the creation of a strategy map and its four distinct regions - financial, customer, internal process, and learning and growth - which correspond to the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard. The authors show step by step how the Mobil division used the map to transform itself from a centrally controlled manufacturer of commodity products to a decentralized, customer-driven organization.

To order this article and others that may be of interest to knowledge managers and practitioners, see: Harvard Business Review

Permission to reprint given by George Pratt, Assistant Director, Marketing, Harvard Business School Publishing

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