Glossary
Balanced Scorecard
The Balanced Scorecard is a framework from Robert Kaplan and David Norton that asks a company to measure four things at once and not money alone. The four are financial results, customers, internal process, and learning and growth. It arrived in a 1992 Harvard Business Review article and is a strategy tool rather than a weekly one.
01
What the four perspectives are worth to a small company
The part that survives at small company size is the balance itself. If a weekly board is nothing but money and sales rows, nothing on it warns you about the delivery team or the people who are about to resign. Most seven row boards settle on money, customers, delivery and one people row, which is the same instinct with less paperwork.
The full framework, with strategy maps and cascaded objectives, was built for organizations that have layers of management to line up. A thirty-person company that tries to run it usually produces a document and no change in behavior. Borrow the check rather than the apparatus: read your board and ask which of the four sides of the business it cannot see.
Worked example: A twenty-eight-person managed services firm had eight rows, six of them financial or sales and two on ticket volume. Nothing measured whether engineers were staying or learning anything. They added voluntary turnover and certification hours booked, then dropped two revenue rows that repeated the same figure in different words. The board got no longer and the blind spot closed.
Sources: The Balanced Scorecard, Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton (1996); hbr.org/1992/01/the-balanced-scorecard-measures-that-drive-performance-2
OKR
OKR stands for objectives and key results: a short qualitative objective paired with about three measurable results that prove it happened.
02Dashboard
A dashboard is a screen showing current values for a set of metrics, usually pulled automatically and refreshed on its own.
03KPI
A KPI is a number a leadership team has agreed to run the business by: one owner, a goal written next to it, and a slot on the weekly agenda.
04Scorecard
A Scorecard is a weekly table of five to fifteen numbers that tells a leadership team whether the business is on track, one owner and one goal per row.
05KPIs and EOS®: build a Scorecard that predicts results
Where KPIs fit inside EOS: the weekly Scorecard, 5 to 15 measurables, one owner each, and a simple picker to draft yours by industry in a few minutes.
Start with a real question
Not sure which of these you actually need?
Tell us what the leadership team is arguing about. A person replies within one business day with a straight answer, whether that is a book, a tool or an implementer.
A person reads every one.