Developed in the early 1990s by Robert Kaplan of Harvard Business School and David Norton, a management thinker, the Balanced Scorecard is everything and nothing the term suggests. It is a measurement tool, but it is not the sort accountants are used to. More specifically, it is a framework for aligning strategic objectives, management systems, and corporate performance. In Kaplan and Norton's words, "The balanced scorecard retains traditional financial measures. But financial measures tell the story of past events, an adequate story for industrial age companies for which investments in long-term capabilities and customer relationships were not critical for success. These financial measures are inadequate, however, for guiding and evaluating the journey that information age companies must make to create future value through investment in customers, suppliers, employees, processes, technology, and innovation."

Implementing the Balanced Scorecard involves dedicating the management to five core principles.

Mobilise change through effective leadership: the leader must impart the organisation with an unmistakable momentum for change, rallying people to the cause of strategic transformation.

Translate the strategy into operational terms: the leader must create a strategy map that lays bare the precise motions of how the goals are to be achieved, detailing the financial picture, risks, customer value-creating differentiation, internal processes and much else.

Align the organisation to the strategy: the leader must work out strategic linkages between different business units and synergise all the parts to add up to a whole greater than their sum.

Make strategy everyone's everyday job: the leader needs to keep everyone engaged all the time via regular communication and alignment of people's personal objectives with the overall strategy, with reward systems structured accordingly.

Make strategy a continual process: the leader must implement a process that puts budgeting in synchrony with the strategy, which in itself needs regular management review on the basis of feedback and learning systems.

The overall benefit is a work balance between immediate must-dos and long-range strategic thinking, and that too, institutionalised in a formal framework based on clear-cut information.