Many leaders understand the importance of matching strategy with operations, but few companies have systems in place to actually do so, according to Robert Kaplan and David Norton, creators of the widely used Balanced Scorecard performance measurement tool and leading advocates for customer profitability analysis. Kaplan recently spoke with MDM Editor Lindsay Young about the challenges inherent with effective strategy implementation in a wholesale distribution company.
 
In their latest book, The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, Kaplan and Norton present a formal systems approach to implement strategy at every level of an organization. The authors’six steps, as shown in the graphic on page 4 of this issue, …