Rating: 
Summary: Organizational Cartography of the Highest Order
Review: Kaplan and Norton co-authored an article which was published in the Harvard Business Review (January/February 1993). In it they introduce an exciting new concept: the balanced scorecard. They have since published three books: this one, preceded by The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action (1996) and The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment (2000). Here's some background on the two books before we shift our attention to Strategy Maps.In The Balanced Scorecard, as Kaplan and Norton explain in their Preface, "the Balanced Scorecard evolved from an improved measurement system to an improved management system." The distinction is critically important to understanding this book. Senior executives in various companies have used the Balanced Scorecard as the central organizing framework for important managerial processes such as individual and team goal setting, compensation, resource allocation, budgeting and planning, and strategic feedback and learning. When writing this book, it was the authors' hope that the observations they share would help more executives to launch and implement Balanced Scorecard programs in their organizations. Then in The Strategy-Focused Organization, Kaplan and Norton note that, according to an abundance of research data, only 5% of the workforce understand their company's strategy, that only 25% of managers have incentives linked to strategy, that 60% of organizations don't link budgets to strategy, and 85% of executive teams spend less than one hour per month discussing strategy. These and other research findings help to explain why Kaplan and Norton believe so strongly in the power of the Balanced Scorecard. As they suggest, it provides "the central organizing framework for important managerial processes such as individual and team goal setting, compensation, resource allocation, budgeting and planning, and strategic feedback and learning." After rigorous and extensive research of their own, obtained while working closely with several dozen different organizations, Kaplan and Norton observed five common principles of a Strategy-Focused Organization: 1. Translate the strategy to operational terms 2. Align the organization to the strategy 3. Make strategy everyone's job 4. Make strategy a continual process 5. Mobilize change through executive leadership The first four principles focus on the the Balanced Scorecard tool, framework, and supporting resources; the importance of the fifth principle is self-evident. "With a Balanced Scorecard that tells the story of the strategy, we now have a reliable foundation for the design of a management system to create Strategy-Focused Organizations." Those who have not as yet read The Balanced Scorecard and/or The Strategy-Focused Organization are strong urged to do so. Brief comments about them in commentaries such as these merely indicate the nature and extent of the brilliant thinking which Kaplan and Norton provide in each. What we have in Strategy Maps are two separate but related components: Further development and refinement of core concepts introduced in the earlier two books, and, a rigorous examination of new ideas and new applications by which to convert intangible assets into tangible outcomes. In the Introduction, Kaplan and Norton explain that their direct involvement with more than 300 organizations provided them with an extensive database of strategies, strategy maps, and balanced scorecards. This abundance of material has revealed a number of strategies and tactics by which literally any organization (regardless of size or nature) can create and then increase value. The strategies and tactics are embraced within three targeted approaches for aligning intangible assets to strategy: "1. Strategic job families that align human capital to the strategic themes 2. The strategic IT portfolio that aligns information capital to the strategic themes 3. An organization change agenda that integrates and aligns organizational capital for continued learning and improvement in the strategic themes." Kaplan and Norton carefully organize their material within five Parts. I presume to suggest that Part I be read and then re-read before proceeding to Value-Creating Processes, Intangible Assets, and Building Strategies and Strategy Maps. Part Five provides a number of case files generated by private-sector, public-sector, and nonprofit organizations. In fact, I strongly suggest that Chapter 2 be re-read several times because it offers an invaluable primer on strategy maps. When reading and then re-reading Chapter 2, be sure to check back on Figure 1-2 (Page 8) and Figure 1-3 (Page 11) in the Introduction. One word of caution from Kaplan and Norton: "It is important (if not imperative) to describe an organization's strategy with word statements of strategic objectives in the four linked perspectives BEFORE turning to measurements. Many organizations building BSCs attempt to go directly from somewhat vague strategy statements to measures without this step, and often omit critical aspects of the strategy or else select from measures that are already available, rather than selecting measures that quantify their strategic objectives." This is a much longer review than I usually compose because I am convinced that only what is measurable is manageable. Also because, after extensive prior experience helping corporate clients with formulating process maps of various kinds, I am convinced that organizational "journeys" to increased sales, profits, and value need maps by which to reach those destinations just as those who drive vehicles do when seeking their own destinations. One of the greatest benefits of strategy maps is that the process by which they are devised helps to ensure that the most appropriate destination is identified. Think of Kaplan and Norton as travel agents and cartographers, to be sure, but also as consultants whose services you can retain merely by purchasing their three books, then by absorbing and digesting the information and counsel those three books provide. For many decision-makers in all manner of organizations, Strategy Maps may well prove to be the most valuable business book they ever read.
Rating:
Summary: Essential Reading for Those Who Want to Implement Strategy!
Review: Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton are the innovators behind the Balanced Scorecard, which has proven to be a potent way of turning strategy into reality. Before the Balanced Scorecard, most strategies failed in execution . . . because people didn't know what they were supposed to do. With the Balanced Scorecard, a very high percentage of strategies are implemented and do succeed. In The Strategy-Focused Organization, Professor Kaplan and Dr. Norton explained the management processes that make implementing the Balanced Scorecard most successful. Strategy Maps now becomes another essential building block in strategy implementation. Importantly, this building block should be the starting point in your search for success. In the preface, the authors describe the three essential elements behind breakthrough results: You must first describe the strategy, then measure the strategy for what needs to be executed and then manage the strategy by the measurements. Describing the strategy is the task addressed in Strategy Maps, measuring the strategy is addressed in the Balanced Scorecard, and The Strategy-Focused Organization looks at managing the strategy by the measurements. Here's the philosophy the authors provide behind this conclusion: "You can't manage (third component) what you can't measure (second component) [and] [y]ou can't measure what you can't describe (first component)." In Strategy Maps, the authors have shown the way to communicate how each element of a company's activities contributes to the overall success of the strategy. Using the Balanced Scorecard, everyone in the organization knows what to be done. With Strategy Maps, each person will understand the context of what they must do and implementation improves. Here's what a template of a typical strategy map includes for a for-profit company in Strategy Maps. First, all of the information is contained on one page. Second, that page has four perspectives: Financial; Customer; Internal; Learning and Growth. Third, the financial perspective looks at creating long-term shareholder value, and builds from a productivity strategy of improving cost structure and asset utilization and a growth strategy of expanding opportunities and enhancing customer value. Fourth, these last four elements of strategic improvement are aided by changes in price, quality, availability, selection, functionality, service, partnerships and branding. Fifth, from an internal perspective, operations and customer management processes help create product and service attributes while innovation, regulatory and social processes help with relationships and image. Sixth, all of these processes are enriched by the proper allocation of human, information and organizational capital. Organizational capital is comprised of company culture, leadership, alignment and teamwork capabilities. Seventh, the cause and effect relationships are describe by connecting arrows. The book is a marvel of clarity. The authors describe what a strategy map is and proceed to share dozens of examples that have been successfully used in both for-profit and non-profit organizations around the world. The examples are carefully chosen to illuminate each element of the strategy map template that they suggest you begin with. In Part IV, they make the task of strategy map building even easier by taking typical strategies that are most often employed and showing how to build a strategy map that characterizes such a strategy. Finally, every chapter also refers to the best published work on what strategies and actions are most likely to succeed. So even if you are not familiar with the literature of creating and implementing successful strategies, you can use Strategy Maps to learn what you need to know. Strategy Maps will be as valuable for small organizations as for large ones. All organizations need to have a better understanding of how all the pieces of a strategy need to fit together. In fact, if you only read one book written about strategy in 2004, you would be wise to choose this one. As a student of continuing business model innovation, I was particularly pleased to see the authors explain how processes can be put in place to improve business models as part of a strategy map. The only missing element in the book from my perspective is how to make strategy maps more compelling for the viewers. In strategy presentations across the country, I've often seen strategy maps that use colorful illustrations and enticing numerical relationships to help those in the trenches to grasp the full scope of how their work connects to everything else. When Strategy Maps is ready for its next edition, I hope the authors will consider adding a section in this regard. In the meantime, they offer a look at this element in the software they advertise for making strategy maps. See their on-line offering for more details. If you have not yet read The Balanced Scorecard and The Strategy-Focused Organization, I strongly encourage you to read those outstanding books as well after you finish Strategy Maps. With the combined perspective of the three books, you should easily outdistance the competition! As I finished the book, I thought about what else keeps strategies from being successful. In my experience, the typical remaining problem other than miscommunication is setting a direction that cannot be implemented in the appropriate time frame. I strongly encourage those who are planning new strategies to develop a strategy map before committing to the new strategy. Then use that strategy map to ask those who would have to implement the strategy what problems they foresee in implementation. In this way, you can adapt the strategy to what you can reasonably hope to execute. This book also made me realize that drawing such a system effects graphic can help explain anything to others. I plan to do so much more often.
Rating:
Summary: Great reference addition
Review: Strategy maps brings together the critical aspects of getting to a successful strategy with all aspects covered from technology to people. Chapter 10 provides the most valuable insights to organization capital readiness - Organizational Culture. Even provides references to helpul methodologies, such as OCP, and tools to help measure it from books and Thinkshed. Great overall view of mapping a strategy.
Rating: 
Summary: Balancing the Strategy
Review: This book has serious inadequacies in its presentation of strategy maps. It is difficult to read and furthermore it offers unbalanced maps which are not significant to business bottom-line. However, the last two chapters of the book are somewhat useful and can help a novice in understanding what strategy maps are and how one could in concept employ in business
Rating: 
Summary: Pharmakon Fun
Review: This book is well written and provides an interesting model for construing workplace. But having said that the book doesnt point out how its methods might fail or might not be for everyone and doesnt provide any real alternatives. It also doesnt try to thoroughly enable readers to think for themselves by providing the necessary "scaffolding". To be able to think on ones feet and change ones models and practices on the fly is what is needed in todays workforce. So in some sense this is a one size fits all approach-albeit an interesting one.
A better book would have come about by using the principle of eduction to enable others to understand how they learn and how they dont learn including: multiple intelleigences, learning style theory,using knowledge discovery systems, visual journaling, active imagination etc. The problem with these books is lack of thoroughness and failure to really tap in to the potential of people and a focus on keeping it simple when simple isn the answer to everything. But this book is a nice try given the aforementioned limitations
Rating: 
Summary: This is a sad book
Review: When Brookings (Unseen Wealth) and the European Union released challenging reports on intangibles in the year 2000, the cat leapt out of the proverbial bag. Traditional accounting measurements don't answer the biggest corporate valuation question, and wherever they are thought sufficient to govern the knowledge of corporate performance, they erode a company's integrity quarter upon quarter. The ink of these reports was hardly dry before extraordinary examples of companies losing all their purpose and all their value poured in - including Andersen the biggest of the traditional measurement firms regarding its roster of network economy clients , whom the world most needed to have their intangibles systemised truly. Kaplan and Norton have jumped on the big issue but totally ignored the big question - of how does one assess what value the goodwill system of an organisation is spinning. Maths is already available in open source codes (see spaces such as valuetrue.com) to map the answer to that question, and other interesting ones such as is the integrity of the system compounding growth or destruction?, How fast?, What methods can leaders use to intervene if value multiplication is at risk of heading towards zero? The failure of Strategic Maps begins with lack of concept richness and flexibility. The intangibles wealth of an organisation needs to be modelled as a systemic whole, the organisation needs to be pictured as an infrastructure of relationships both of contextual productivity (service-learning-doing-leading) and value-demands from all core stakeholders. Instead of the Strategic Map's concepts visualised in activities, processes or competences, an exchange-based theory of the firm is needed to see every period whether win-wins trust flows between different stakeholders and cooresponding motivations (with postitive openness or negative politics) spreading across different knowledge working teams and communities who need to be truly sustained by contextually purposeful values. All this becomes even more critical as you map the transparency of trust-flow between global partners (both corporations and democratic governments) whose borders need to be open if a worldwide market is to be served in a way that respects people's needs at every locality. This is a sad book for many reasons. It ignores all the researchers that have dedicated much of the last 5 years to the big questions raised by Brookings and the EU at euintangibles.net. It misses all the humanity of organisations and living systems and the policy questions of human and social capital such as those indicated by the record low levels of trust in organisations monitored by the World Economic Forum. It omits huge questions concerning risk professionals on how conflicts compound in a highly networked age. Ultimately it misses all the research coming from Harrison Owen's Open Spaces (100000 innovation contexts studied and communally practiced) and Drucker's Claremont College on why joy of accomplishment is action-learning's energiser of every human being who wants to make a difference with their unique talents, and every organisation that values human beings. This book does not confront the assumptions of tangible accounting; the way this has historically used addition to separate the dynamics of goodwill whose trust-flows actually map through value multipliers so as to visualise highly connected 'ways ahead' - humanly interconnecting both how behaviours compound and what nature of emotionally intelligent values flow. It does not begin with the Brookings/EU puzzle that the whole networking and knowledge age and lifelong elearning our children will need addressed. So the big picture of 21st C organisation will continue to be blinded from leaders -however transparently they wish to govern- while organisations propagate the tangible auditor's century-old machine-age assumption that people are costs to cut while machines can be booked in as investments. Chris Macrae, Mathematician & co-author, THE MAP (Wiley 2004)
Rating:
Summary: Templates for translating strategy into action
Review: Whether you like Kaplan & Norton's concept of the balanced scorecard or not, we probably can agree that they have had huge adoption of their ideas in many of the biggest firms in the world.
Kaplan & Norton's focus on creating easy-to-understand frameworks for implementing strategy is admirable. They have published their ideas in articles and books over they last 10 years. This book - Strategy Maps - is the third book in their campaign for making strategy happen.
The first book from 1996 introduced the BALANCED SCORECARD (BSC). A tool that translates an organization's mission and strategy into a comprehensive set of performance measures that provides the framework for a strategic measurement and management system. The performance measures were arranged into four PERSPECTIVES. Viewed horizontally, like in a grid, each perspective represents the set of objectives desired by a particular stakeholder (Financial, Customer, Internal Process/Organization, Learning & Growth/Employees). The perspectives, when taken together, permit a complete view of the strategy and "tell the story of a strategy" in a clearly understandable framework.
In 2001, the second book introduced the STRATEGY-FOCUSED ORGANIZATION that places strategy at the centre of its management processes - not only for measurement purposes. Strategy is now central to the firm's agenda. There are five principles to a Strategy-Focused Organization: Mobilize Change through Executive Leadership; Translate the Strategy to Operational Terms [that is, balanced scorecard and strategy map]; Align the Organization to the Strategy; Make Strategy Everyone's Job; Make Strategy a Continual Process.
Finally in 2004, this book expands the concept of the STRATEGY MAP, which is a visual representation of an organization's strategy and the processes and systems necessary to implement that strategy. A strategy map is basically a one-page graphical summary, showing employees how their jobs are linked to the organization's overall objectives.
This book adds some new contributions to the concept of strategy maps:
TEMPLATES. The main benefit of this book may be the (very) many templates that should stimulate most readers to build their own customised strategy map. Being a relatively experienced balanced scorecard practitioner myself, I certainly enjoyed the inspiration from the templates. Most benefit is derived from the templates that describe the basic components of how value gets created in the internal process perspective as well as the learning and growth perspective. I can highly recommend the strategy map templates reflecting the firm's generic competitive strategy - lowest-cost vs. product leader vs. customer intimacy.
STRATEGIC THEMES, which are based on a few selected key value-creating processes. The authors introduce a taxonomy that classifies internal value-creating processes into four clusters that each may have literally hundreds of sub-processes that create value in some way:
- operations management (i.e. producing and delivering. Also known as supply chain management)
- customer management (or CRM)
- innovation of products and processes (such as Product-Lifecycle Management etc.)
- regulatory and social: conforming to regulations and societal expectations
INTANGIBLE ASSETS FRAMEWORK, which attempts to describe, measure, and align the three intangible assets in the learning and growth perspective to the strategic processes and objectives in the internal perspectives. The three types of intangible assets are:
- Human capital: employees' skills, talent, and knowledge.
- Organization capital: culture, leadership, employee alignment, teamwork, and knowledge management
- Information capital: Databases, information systems, network, and technology infrastructure
I have worked in practice with the balanced scorecard since 1998. This book is a natural follow-up to the authors' previous work. I fully acknowledge the critical issues mentioned by some of the reviewers. So if you don't want to work with balanced scorecard, let this book go.
But if you are already working within this strategy framework in your organization, you really shouldn't miss this book. It expands on many of the interesting ideas that you probably already know. It also brings you up to date with their current thinking. That's why I rate it four stars.
Peter Leerskov,
MSc in International Business (Marketing & Management) and Graduate Diploma in E-business
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing -- this should have stopped at an HBR article
Review: While the strategy map examples are helpful, this book is definately not worth the money nor the time to read it. Instead I recommend reading K&N's articles in the Harvard Business Review as you will get everything that you need -- do not bother with the book. And here is why: First, the book is very repetitive and while there are many examples of the strategy maps the distinctions between them are not always very apprent so if you have seen a strategy map you have by in large seen them all. Second, I believe that K&N did not write the book, rather it was put together by a ghost writer who borrowed just about every consulting phrase or description I have read in other books. Comments regarding things like the supply chain tend toward being so simplistic that they damage the credibility of the authors. I do not think we get an idea of what K&N think, rather than a ghost writer. Third, the strategy map does not address key issues associated with strategy deployment and management. The treatment of Information Technology is more akin to a 1970's view of technology than what companies are doing now. The structure, while supportive of the balance scorecard, does not provide a map on how you get from where you are to where you want to be. So take a big pass on this book, read the Harvard Business Review articles as they are much better and give you all you need to know. It is a shame since K&N's other work has been very powerful and influential.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing -- this should have stopped at an HBR article
Review: While the strategy map examples are helpful, this book is definately not worth the money nor the time to read it. Instead I recommend reading K&N's articles in the Harvard Business Review as you will get everything that you need -- do not bother with the book. And here is why: First, the book is very repetitive and while there are many examples of the strategy maps the distinctions between them are not always very apprent so if you have seen a strategy map you have by in large seen them all. Second, I believe that K&N did not write the book, rather it was put together by a ghost writer who borrowed just about every consulting phrase or description I have read in other books. Comments regarding things like the supply chain tend toward being so simplistic that they damage the credibility of the authors. I do not think we get an idea of what K&N think, rather than a ghost writer. Third, the strategy map does not address key issues associated with strategy deployment and management. The treatment of Information Technology is more akin to a 1970's view of technology than what companies are doing now. The structure, while supportive of the balance scorecard, does not provide a map on how you get from where you are to where you want to be. So take a big pass on this book, read the Harvard Business Review articles as they are much better and give you all you need to know. It is a shame since K&N's other work has been very powerful and influential.
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