The Governance Library curated by Matthew Doyle
Strategy Room · Note 13
Balanced Scorecard
00:00 / 11:00
mæd partners
Scene 1
Hero
H1: The Balanced Scorecard.
Sub: A discipline for measuring the strategy the board has adopted, not the one that is easiest to count.
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Frame
Eyebrow: `STRATEGY ROOM · NOTE 13 OF 15`
H1: Balanced Scorecard.
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Origin
Date plate: January-February 1992.
Caption: Kaplan & Norton · Harvard Business Review.
Pulled fragment: "Financial measures alone tell the board whether last year worked. They cannot tell the board whether this year is working."
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The four perspectives (Path-2)
Quad-grid card.
- Financial · for the shareholder.
- Customer · for the market position.
- Internal process · for the operating engine.
- Learning & growth · for tomorrow's capability.
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The grammar
Eyebrow: `THE GRAMMAR`
Four rows:
Perspective.
Objective.
Measure.
Target & initiative.
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Foundational positive · Mobil
Date plate: 1994 to 1997.
H2: Mobil NAM&R.
Caption: Kaplan & Norton implementation. Worst to first in profitability per gallon.
Pull stat: Three years.
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Strategy maps
Date plate: 2000.
Caption: Kaplan & Norton · The Strategy-Focused Organization.
Body: The cause-and-effect chain that links learning-and-growth investment to financial performance.
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The argument
Strategy lives in the scorecard.
Change the scorecard and you change the strategy, whether the strategy document gets rewritten or not.
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Case anchor
H1: BP plc.
Sub: The scorecard tells the story.
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BP scorecard structure
Eyebrow: `BP DIMENSIONS · TIED TO LTIP`
- Financial: cash flow · capital discipline · distributions.
- Customer: brand · operational reliability.
- Internal process: safety · operational emissions · project delivery.
- Learning & growth: lower-carbon capability · workforce · diversity.
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Weight trace (Path-2)
Eyebrow: `LEARNING & GROWTH WEIGHT YEAR-ON-YEAR`
Bar chart.
- 2021: ~30%.
- 2022: ~28%.
- 2023: ~22%.
- 2024: ~18%.
- 2025: < financial weight, taken together.
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Reset began earlier
Hero card.
The reset did not begin on 4 February 2025.
It began in the remuneration committee two years earlier.
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Contemporary positive · Hilti
H1: Hilti AG.
Sub: Family-owned · Liechtenstein · BSC Hall of Fame inductee 2002.
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Hilti's discipline
Eyebrow: `WHAT HILTI DOES DIFFERENTLY`
Two rows:
Customer perspective owned by name on the executive board, quarterly reviews against named segments.
Learning-&-growth tied to succession-planning capability gaps and tracked as a multi-year pipeline.
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The Goodhart trap
Pulled quote: "Any measure that becomes a target ceases to be a good measure."
Caption: Goodhart's Law.
Pill: Niven, 2006: scorecards drift from purpose to optimisation.
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The closing question
Read your own scorecard front to back.
Which perspective is under-weighted relative to the strategy the board has actually committed to,
and who benefits from that under-weighting?
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Credit
Curated by Matthew Doyle · mæd partners.
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Educational material · not legal, regulatory, or investment advice · see `00 - Disclaimers.md` for the full notice · © 2026 mæd partners limited.