While Robert Kaplan did write the introduction, he and Norton must be very dissappointed that they didn't write this book -- I'm certainly sorry that I didn't write it. Author Paul R. Niven provides all the tools, methodologies and steps necessary to create and execute your own balanced scorecard. He's held nothing back. It's all here. Whether you lead a local non-profit or are the CEO of a Fortune Global 500 corporation (like my clients), Niven has provided detailed step-by-step instructions for both of the key phases of the balanced scorecard project:

I. Planning Stage:
Step One: Develop objectives
Step Two: Determine appropriate organizational unit(s).
Step Three: Gain executive sponsorship.
Step Four: Build your balanced scorecard team.

Step Five: Formulate your project plan.
Step Six: Develop a communication plan.

II. Development Stage:
Step One: Gather and distribute background material.
Step Two: Develop mission, values, vision, and strategy.
Step Three: Conduct extensive interviews.
Step Four: Develop objectives and measures.
Step Five: Develop cause-and-effet linkages.
Step Six: Establish targest for your measures.
Step Seven: Develop the implementation plan.

This book is fantastic. In fact, I'm thinking about placing a bulk order for the book to give to all my clients. On second thought, why give away all the "secrets?" Seriously, this is one of the best business and management books I've read this year. Overall grade: AAA+++/Highly Recommended.

The main reason for the introduction of the balanced scorecard was that, in the authors' views, organizations only measured financial performance. There was too much emphasis on financial measures and not enough on operational performance. By complementing financial measures of past performance with the objectives and measures of financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth, managers are provided with a framework to translate a strategy into operational terms. The great thing about the balanced scorecard is that it minimizes information overload by limiting the number of measures. It forces managers to focus on the handful of measures that are most critical.

This article made it finally possible for managers to express and measure operational performance. Great thing about the balanced scorecard is that it a simple visual tool. If you like this article, the logical step is to read their follow-up HBR-articles 'Putting the Scorecard to Work' (1993) and 'Using the Balanced Scorecard as a Strategic Management System' (1996) or their 1996-book 'The Balanced Scorecard: Turning Strategy into Action'. The article uses simple US-English.

If you are interested in learning more about Activity-Based Costing, this book is not the best choice for you. Professor Kaplan has co-authored books that explore this subject in much greater detail.

Most people set as their initial priority the need to have accurate financial reporting for the entire enterprise. Falling below that level of effectiveness is Stage I in the terms of this book. Once you have that financial reporting done accurately, you are at Stage II. But you know almost nothing about how to manage your costs better. In order to do that, you will need to establish ad hoc financial reporting processes designed to help your organization learn from its experience and identify opportunities for improvement, built around Activity-Based Costing (ABC). ABC is simply a way of more accurately applying overhead costs back to activities and then processes that permits accurately understanding more about which combinations of products and services and customers are profitable and which are not. Then, within each activity, you can also see the inefficiencies in what you are doing that present opportunities for improvement. The book also has a nice discussion of Kaizen costing that is widely used in Japanese companies looking for on-going cost improvements, based on Professor Cooper's research. There are a few case histories to illustrate the principles, but most will find these insufficient to guide them through the process. In other books, Professor Kaplan has pointed out that there is a lot of acquired art in the subject and you probably need help to get it right. I concur. Once you have ABC operating in stand-alone systems, you are at Stage III.

At this point, you will have a financial reporting system that is separate from the ABC system. How do you put them together? That the subject of chapter 14, which is the key value-added part of this book. You will see what the systems architecture and process flow needs to be in order to combine ABC with Enterprise-Wide Systems (EWS) of the sort that many large companies have invested in during recent years. Putting the two together will greatly improve planning, budgeting, design of new products and services, and operational improvements. Chapter 15 expands into the area of how to apply the combined system to budgeting and transfer pricing. Combing ABC and EWS puts you at Stage IV, a level rarely reached today.

The book's main message is that it's a mistake to try to go from Stage II directly to Stage IV. There's a lot of experimentation and mistakes that you can benefit from in an extended Stage III. I agree again, based on my experience with ABC.

The one caution you should have about ABC in this context is that if you are going to radically change your business model every 2-5 years as many companies are, Stage IV is probably unattainable and undesirable. You can't hold back business model innovation for better cost systems. The next business model innovation will probably give you better costs than tweaking the current business model with ABC will.

Seek out the fastest route to progress, and do more of it!

After spending more than a year at it, at all levels of government from top to bottom, the Balanced Scorecard was dropped like a hot potato. It is virtually incomprehensible to staff, encourages the worst kind of navel gazing, and moves government away from its core mission of protecting and promoting public health and safety to hundreds of possible sub-measures of dubious value. Thousands of staff hours, at the public's expense, were expended trying to make sense of an approach that even the paid consultants couldn't explain in terms the average legislator could understand.

This is REALLY BAD STUFF.

If you are a management accountant this book will put your work into perspective as well as caution you about the pitfalls of doing things the way theu have always been done.

More balanced than one would expect for a book with this title, Mr. Kaplan nicely straddles the line between fact and commentary, with only a couple times succumbing to interjections of personal opinion. However, without such points, a rather dry, far less thought-provoking, piece of academia would have resulted.

A book guaranteed to broaden the knowledge of anyone interested in this fascinating part of the world.

Although Kaplan does highlight the tensions between Arabists and those with pro-Israeli sympathies, the work serves to demonstrate through historical biography the evolution of western influence in the region. He makes the case that the Palestinian-Israeli issue has not strictly defined the Middle East. Kaplan doesn't write from personal recollection, however, as he did with Balkan Ghosts. This book is research based through reading and extensive interviews with many from the State Department and elsewhere.

The last portion of the book focuses on events in the State Department leading up to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. Kaplan blasts many of the Arabists, former ambassador to Iraq April Glaspie foremost among them, for attempting to appease Saddam. Although he qualifies his critique by portraying a lack of policy emphasis from Washington leaving the embassy staffs in the Middle East to find their own way forward, Kaplan claims the Arabists continued to view Iraq and other totalitarian regimes through rose colored glasses. Had they represented U.S. interests instead of romanticizing from within embassy walls, he argues that our diplomats could have sent Saddam the signal that the U.S. would respond to aggression.

Overall, I found the book provided an interesting historical background on the Middle East region through the eyes of the diplomats that have served there. Kaplan provides good background reading up to Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Given the current tension surrounding the Iraqi regime, I found much of the book relevant to contemporary affairs. Well worth the read!

The issues of border dissolution between U.S. and Mexico and between Pacific North West and British Columbia are empathized very much in this book. These issues are closely related with immigration and decline of nation state. The phenomena of border dissolution is not peculiar to North American continent. For example, the border line between North Korea and China is also being dissolved because of N.K.'s famine. (As a South Korean man, I'm very much concerned about future N.K.'s absorption into either China or South Korea. No small, rich country wants to share border line with a big, strong but poor country. South Korean government is helping North Korea despite political grievances to prevent such an outcome, or so I guess.) Anyway, the strict control of immigration is not universal through human history. I guess it was strengthened because of Cold War.

Robert D. Kaplan presents an engaging view of the Americanwest and the closely related areas of British Columbia and Mexico. Hisjourneys take him to such disparate places as St. Louis, Vicksburg, Kansas City, Vancouver, Mexico City, Los Angeles and the Oklahoma panhandle. In some ways the book provides further insights into trends previously chronicled in "Edge Cities," "The Nine Nations of North America" and "Ecotopia."

• Kaplan provides one of the most succinct descriptions of the demise of St. Louis --- a city that has lost 60 percent of its population, which he concludes "no longer exists."

• He provides a sympathetic description of the Oklahoma panhandle, constituting what may be the most comprehensive coverage of this geographical corner virtually unknown to most of the nation.

• The book spends considerable time in discussing Arizona, its major cities and its native American preserves.

Kaplan finds that people in the emerging American communities, especially in the technology oriented edge cities, are likely to have much more in common with people they have only met through telecommunications than with their geographical neighbors, or people who live just a few miles away. In this regard, he correctly recognizes that the very meaning of community is undergoing a radical change.

The only significant problem is an uncritical acceptance of the Portland's purported land use planning success. Kaplan indicates that Portland has avoided the "unlimited growth" that has plagued other US cities. He further indicates that the cities of the Northwest (Vancouver and presumably Portland and Seattle) are devoid of sprawl. In fact, Portland sprawls at lower densities than Los Angeles and the central city of Portland is barely one-half to one-third as dense as the Orange County suburbs of Anaheim, Buena Park and Santa Ana. This mistake is often made by people who visit Portland's tiny but engaging core, while missing the other 99 percent of the urbanized area, which resembles Phoenix, though with more vegetation and more sprawl (less density).

With the noted exception the Kaplan book is important, useful and recommended as a thoughtful and apparently accurate assessment of US social trends as the 21st century approaches.

Wendell Cox
The Public Purpose

In Empire Wilderness, Kaplan does all of this for the United States, although in the quieter portions of the nation from the Mississippi to the Pacific, with emphasis on the deep Great Plains and Arizona. In doing so, as ususal, the author picks up on some social and demographic trends that are significant and profound in how they will change the "white bread" America of the 20th Century into something a good deal different. Kaplan's work seldom cheers the reader up with prospects for the future, although it is always impeccably well written. On the other hand, it absolutely never fails to educate, usually on an underappreciated subject. This time, the subject isn't just close to home, it is home.