A large and well respected China industrial giant is completing their project to put in a strategy management system. They have passed through several phases, each one critical for achieving their desired business objectives. One of their internal management challenges involved the question of how to create a strategy management system that was dramatically more effective than their internal performance management system. They obtained advice from one of the top global consulting firms for how to improve their performance management system, but that proved to be insufficient for accomplishing their critical business objectives

The strategy management project team sought the advice of a consulting firm specializing in using the Balanced Scorecard as a tool for strategy management. The project team obtained education, training and consulting advice from this firm on each of the three stages in deploying a strategy management system: First, describe the Strategy; second, measure the Strategy; and third, manage the Strategy.

In the first phase [Described the Strategy], a series of activities and workshops were undertaken by the project team and consulting firm that were targeted toward creating a Strategy Map, which is a graphical one page description of the company's strategy for success. The project team and company executives were delighted with this document because it captured the essence of what they wanted to accomplish in a simple and fundamental manner. Previous approaches at describing the strategy had proven to be too complicated, cumbersome and unwieldy.

In the second phase [Measure the Strategy], an entirely different set of activities and workshops were conducted to develop measures of the strategy at multiple levels of the vast organization, across its vertically integrated value chain. As the vertical and horizontal alignment issues were clarified, functional managers were brought to a new level of understanding for how they could play a critical role for successfully executing the company strategy. The Balanced Scorecard measures for their SBU and functional departments helped them focus on the critical few objectives that were essential for strategic success. Strategic initiatives were separately identified to translate the strategy into planned action.

In the third phase [Manage the Strategy], the project team and company executives continued their learning for how to simplify the complexity of strategy management. They learned how to link strategy maps and balanced scorecards to a variety of critical areas within the organization: governance, budgeting, information technology, reporting, review meetings, business processes, etc. The application and deployment of these practices is currently underway at this organization.

This third phase included consideration of a revision in the company's organizational structure: the creation of an Office of Strategy Management [OSM]. The OSM is the latest innovation arising from the Balanced Scorecard Collaborative's [BSCol] current research activities. I recently gave a workshop on linking strategy to compensation at the BSCol Summit and Hall of Fame for Strategy Execution award conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. At that conference, Dr. David Norton presented the latest findings from the OSM research project that BSCol is spearheading for continuing the evolution of global best practices in strategy management. The industrial giant described in the above case is beginning to implement these best practices in their organization.

Look out world, China is going global!?