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Most organizations contain multiple business and support units,
each led by highly trained, experienced executives and staffed by talented employees.
But too often, different units fail to coordinate: they work at cross-purposes
and have conflicting goals. Results? Performance-sapping disagreements, lost opportunities,
wasted resources -- and a corporation whose value amounts to less than the sum
of its parts. The authors maintain that the responsibility
for organizational alignment lies with corporate headquarters. They show how top
executives can build a corporate-level strategy map and scorecard that graphically
depict their company's "enterprise value proposition" -- how the organization
creates synergies from its business units -- and use the revolutionary Balanced
Scorecard management system to set, coordinate, and oversee implementation of
high-level strategy A wealth of case studies, actionable
frameworks, and sample strategy maps and scorecards from actual companies reveal
how business leaders can use the Balanced Scorecard to ensure that all
parts of their organization are working in concert toward the same strategic end. Alignment
provides an array of potent practices -- including: - Ways
to leverage financial synergies across a diverse corporate portfolio -- for instance,
through effective monitoring and resource-allocation processes
- Methods
for encouraging the cross-selling of products and services to create unique solutions
for customers shared among multiple business units
- Techniques
for sharing common processes among units to gain economies of scale and capture
specialized knowledge and expertise
The next
breakthrough in strategy execution from the field's premier thinkers, Alignment
shows how today's companies can liberate unrealized value through enterprise synergies
-- and channel that value into stellar performance. Robert
S. Kaplan is the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School. David
P. Norton serves as President of the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative/Palladium.
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