Strategic thinkers, planners and executers were often at sea when asked to think about considering all the aspects of an organization to ideate, implement and monitor strategic development in consonance with vision, mission, and objectives with a measured approach. This handicap was removed once Kaplan and Norton brought to the fore their pioneering works on Balanced Scorecard. This article tries to explain the concept of Balanced Scorecard with the help of story and illustrations.

Organizations need to craft a strategy which makes them viable in this fierce competitive environment. Gaining mindshare of the customers followed by the conversion of that into market share through sales might seem to be a marketing or sales-related function. In the era of integrated management, stand-alone approaches or the concept of watertight compartments comes to a naught especially because the competitiveness in the marketplace is the result of all the departments working in tandem with the corporate objectives, values, mission and vision in mind. It is therefore imperative on the part of strategic thinkers to understand the challenge and put forth a set of hypotheses which have cause and effect on the organization.

Strategic planning is put on paper more or less by all organizations big and small, but to what extent and proportion they are able to successfully implement those and convert them into deliverables is a moot question. A few of the reasons why strategic planning fails could be the difficulty in integrating, leading to goals not being aligned with departments, teams and even individuals.

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