Find the numbers that should run the business.
Describe the company, explore upstream drivers and downstream outcomes, and build toward a genuinely balanced scorecard. Every balance condition stays red until it is satisfied.
Start with a balanced recommendation
Select twelve measures matched to your company—three per perspective, with upstream, midstream, downstream, leading, and lagging coverage.
Build the strategy before measuring it.
Connect organizational capacity to internal execution, customer value, and financial results. The arrows are hypotheses—not guarantees.
The vital few numbers.
Set the baseline, target, owner, cadence, and actual. Status updates automatically based on the direction of improvement.
| Status | Measure | Perspective / objective | Type | Baseline | Target | Actual | Owner | Cadence |
|---|
Connect the result to controllable work.
Trace a strategic measure through function, team, and frontline activity. A chain without evidence is an assumption to test.
What requires a decision?
Separate execution failures from weak assumptions, poor measures, missing ownership, and unrealistic targets.
Leadership decision
One scorecard. Two dimensions.
The Balanced Scorecard defines what strategic success requires. The Feldman Metrics Cascade shows how those results connect to controllable work.
Do not let financial performance hide strategic weakness.
Balance financial results with customer value, internal process performance, and the organizational capabilities needed for the future.
- Financial: What must the economics produce?
- Customer: What promise must be true?
- Process: What must the company do exceptionally well?
- Capacity: What people, systems, and capabilities must exist?
The strategy map is a set of hypotheses.
Capability should enable process improvement, which should create customer value, which should produce financial results. Make the assumptions visible enough to test.
Every objective needs evidence.
A complete measure has a definition, baseline, target, actual, owner, cadence, source, and direction of improvement.
- Use leading and lagging measures.
- Keep the set small enough to discuss.
- Remove metrics that never affect decisions.
Accountability should follow controllability.
Leadership owns the result. Functions and teams own the drivers. Frontline people should primarily own behaviors or outputs they can change now.
One changes. One stays healthy.
Use OKRs for strategic change over a defined period. Use KPIs to monitor ongoing operating health. They can live together without being treated as the same instrument.
The scorecard exists to improve decisions.
Review actuals, inspect drivers, challenge assumptions, select corrective action, and record one accountable owner with a date.