The Origins of the Balanced Scorecard

Despite rapid adoption of Total Quality Management (TQM) principles in the late 1980s, many companies found themselves struggling to tie TQM to their bottom-line results, simply because TQM efforts tended to focus on isolated projects that most often did not have any linkage to strategic goals.

Recognizing this problem, Doctors Robert S. Kaplan and David Norton studied many organizations that were successfully addressing strategic linkage and execution, including Florida Power & Light (FPL), an electric utility at which ActiveStrategy CEO Jack Steele was a General Manager.

From these studies, The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) concept was born and described in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article and in subsequent books by Doctors Kaplan and Norton.

ActiveStrategy’s leadership has decades of hands-on experience – reaching back to the Deming Prize-winning Florida Power & Light. We apply this deep understanding of the fundamentals, as well as how to apply them successfully in real business environments, to help our clients improve results.

• Why Use a Balanced Scorecard?
• What a Balanced Scorecard is NOT
• Building a Top-Level Scorecard