Global adaptations of the Balanced Scorecard

In 2GC we have looked at this question quite closely for many years now. Since 1999 we've worked for clients in 40 countries across 5 continents, and so for us understanding the differences between regions and countries is really quite important!

There are several dimensions you can consider for such comparisons. Three worth considering are management culture, wider social culture and technological infrastructure. Of these three, management culture is the most influential.

We have observed real differences in management culture between regions, and this affects how you go about designing the Balanced Scorecard. We have found that management culture is partly driven by the organisation (each has its own style), and partly by geography. For example, North American managers work / behave in a quite different way to European ones, and design methods that work well in one of these regions don't work so well in the other. Factors to consider are the extent to which managers work as teams vs. individuals, and the power leap between layers of management.

Wider social culture affects what types of interactivity you can use during design processes, and how the Balanced Scorecard might get used. Some cultures are used to collective decision making and responsibility, and find group accountability models such as Balanced Scorecard easy to pick up and work with. In others, the idea of being accountable or having measurable targets is a novelty. Where this has an impact is the extent to which the Balanced Scorecard might be adopted and used once it has been designed.

Technological infrastructure is a factor when it comes to running a Balanced Scorecard reporting process: the complexity of the design and the reporting process you design has to mirror what is plausible to carry out within the organisation. For some organisations half a dozen objectives is really all they would be able to report routinely, for others you might be able to work with dozens. It is not just about computers either - a key part of strategic performance management is tracking 'what is going on'. For example, in markets where there are no equivalents to market share data providers, tracking '#1 in our market' type goals becomes expensive, infrequent and time consuming - you need to moderate your designs to suit the kind of information that might be available.

HTH

Gavin Lawrie 2GC Active Management

I haven't seen major differences in how the Balanced Scorecard is used in different countries. I have, however, seen differences in how the BSC is used in different industries. I think there are other threads here that talk about the differences in the BSC in the nonprofit sector, etc.