Balanced Scorecard & Tableau de bord Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Balanced Scorecard & Tableau de bord - Essay Example rspective regarding performance measurement systems, which are usually implemented with respect to their strategic and organizational relevance - their cultural and ideological backgrounds being generally disregarded. In addition, this analysis provides some insight into the more general question of the transferability of management methods. Over 20 years ago Steven Kerr wrote an article entitled “On the Folly of Hoping for A and Rewarding B”. The paper, now considered a “classic”, described how many companies performance measurement systems were rewarding different behaviors than the ones they hoped to obtain from their employees. This issue has received much attention over the last few years. In particular, Robert Kaplan and David Norton have published a series of three Harvard Business Review articles proposing a specific framework, called Balanced Scorecard, to facilitate the translation of strategy into action. The idea of having some form of balanced picture of company performance is not new in itself. Many companies have for years tracked and reported multiple indicators. Further, many countries have also had particular traditions. In France, for example, companies have been using a related tool called “Tableau de Bord” for over 50 years. The paper reviews and compares Tableau de Bord and Balanced Scorecard. The authors conclude that Kaplan and Nortons Balanced Scorecard represents a welcome addition and goes further than what most companies and countries were doing. The Balanced Scorecard approach to management control, as developed by [The Balanced Scorecard: measures that drive performance. Harvard Bus. Rev. 1992 (January–February) 71], has generated a great deal of interest, at least in academic circles and in consulting firms, and it has been promoted by its authors as a novelty. This is surprising for French accounting scholars and practitioners who developed a similar technique in the 1930s called the Tableau de bord. This paper critically