Founded: 1999 • BostonImitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but too much emulation can turn a good idea into something bad. Nobody knows this better than David P. Norton, president of Balanced Scorecard Collaborative Inc. (BSCol) in Boston.
Norton and Dr. Robert S. Kaplan are widely credited with developing the Balanced Scorecard model for measuring organizational performance in the early 1990s. Through a series of Harvard Business Review articles and best-selling books, Norton and Kaplan became synonymous with the Balanced Scorecard model. By 1998, the model had been adopted by 62 percent of the Fortune 500, and Norton and Kaplan had begun a professional services firm around performance measurement. Today, the firm has more than 200 clients and 62 professionals in offices in Boston, London, and Australia.
As expected, the consulting and software industries have jumped on board to offer their own versions of the Balanced Scorecard, much to Norton's amusement — and concern.
"That's been our challenge — how do we prevent that term from getting away? You may wake up one morning and read an article that says '70 percent of Balanced Scorecard uses fail,' which is what happened with re-engineering," Norton says. Norton and Kaplan never considered acquiring a trademark or copyright for the name because they thought that it was the perfect common term. "Just hearing it, you can understand what it means," Norton says. "The problem is that everybody then starts saying that they're using the Balanced Scorecard. They think they are, but they're really not doing it the way we would." So Norton's firm took on a second role as protector of Balanced Scorecard integrity — the gold standard at the epicenter of the scorecard universe.
BSCol keeps its connection to the original scorecard through high-profile clients like Ingersoll Rand, Saatchi & Saatchi, and the U.S. Army, and through conferences, new books, and annual Balanced Scorecard awards for companies that have achieved breakthrough results. The firm also developed a 70,000-member on-line community to keep clients informed.
Software vendors posed another threat to the global Scorecard movement in 2000. Oracle, SAP, PeopleSoft, SAS, and Hyperion signaled their intent to create Balanced Scorecard software. So BSCol created a set of functional standards that described what an authentic Balanced Scorecard application should look like, and invited the vendors to become certified in Balanced Scorecard standards. Every major vendor accepted. But there are still many Balanced Scorecard software vendors and Web sites that aren't affiliated with BSCol. Looking ahead, BSCol will continue defining what the new "strategic management offers" will look like and push to have them integrated into every organizational structure.
As for the imitators, Norton insists that competition isn't necessarily bad. "Our experience has been to just be open, like an open standard, so that the world will always look to you as the source. As long as you're able to keep yourself as the point of reference, then you will be the brand."
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