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20th Anniversary of the Balanced Scorecard - Commentaries
Edited by Zahirul Hoque
Background and introduction
I am pleased and honored that the editor of the Journal of Accounting & Organization Change (JAOC ) chose to recognize the 20th anniversary year of the publication of the first balanced scorecard (BSC) article in the Harvard Business Review (HBR ) by Dave Norton and me ([4] Kaplan and Norton, 1992). That article summarized a 1990 research project with 12 companies led by Norton and for which I served as an academic consultant. The project's goal was to explore new approaches for performance management in companies whose primary source of value came from intangible, not financial or physical assets. Since that article appeared, Norton and I published a couple dozen more articles in HBR and other management journals plus five books with Harvard Business School Press. While the original article's focus was on performance measurement, our work with early adopting companies between 1992 and 1995, caused us to realize that the BSC could become the foundation of an entirely new system for strategy management and execution. Strategy execution has been the focus of our work for the past 16 years, and indeed had already been featured in the second half of the original BSC book ([5] Kaplan and Norton, 1996a) and a 1996 HBR article ([6] Kaplan and Norton, 1996b).
Commentaries on the BSC in this journal
With the above background, I was surprised that four of the five commentaries in this volume of the JAOC addressed the original (1992) performance measurement aspect of our work and hardly at all the strategy execution focus of the past 16 years. As a consequence, the commentaries provide only a narrow perspective on the implications of the BSC for management theory and practice. Also, none of the authors (one small exception) described any personal experiences they had with actual enterprises, private or public, implementing the BSC. I addressed the distancing of academics from actual practice in my AAA Presidential Scholar address three years ago ([13] Kaplan, 2011). The commentaries provide additional data points consistent with my observations of the 40 year trend for academics not to perform original research in the field.
Since the commentaries are so different from...