Create and execute with a strategy map.
Most organizations underinvest in setting, linking, and revisiting goals; a business strategy map fixes that by making cause-and-effect explicit. Paired with a balanced scorecard, it connects learning and growth to internal processes, customer outcomes, and financial returns. Build it bottom-up, pressure-test it with feedback, and refine it as conditions—and risks—evolve.
Points clés
- Only 51 percent of organizational leaders attempt to develop goals, and just 6 percent revisit them regularly (Phoenix Business Journal).
- A business strategy map is a visual tool that links objectives with clear cause-and-effect arrows and action-verb goals.
- Harvard Business School Professor Robert Simons emphasizes that a strategy map underpins how an organization creates value and executes ideas.
- The balanced scorecard tracks four perspectives: financial, customer, internal business process, and learning and growth.
- Without a strategy map, a balanced scorecard risks becoming a disconnected list of measures (Simons).
- Start mapping from the bottom (learning and growth) to the top (financial) to ensure realistic, value-creating goals.
- Core values should guide goals; for example, Google aligns objectives with its mission to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful.
- Seeking feedback boosts buy-in and performance; Gallup reports highly engaged business units achieve 23 percent greater profitability and lower turnover.
- Strategy maps should be revised to address shifting markets, disruptive technologies, evolving customer needs, and cultural risk exposures; high-pressure, high-performing firms are especially vulnerable (Simons).
- HBS Online’s Strategy Execution course and a free strategy e-book offer practical frameworks for building and deploying a strategy map.
À retenir
Start simple: write your core values, sketch a few arrows from learning and growth up to financial outcomes, and sanity-check it with your team. Then pick measures that actually match those arrows—yes, fewer dashboards, more decisions. Revisit the map quarterly, because markets change faster than your last all-hands. And if you ever feel lost, remember: a “balanced scorecard” without a map is just a very tidy to-do list.
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