Having trouble with your strategy? Then map it

If you were a military general on the march, you'd want your troops to have plenty of maps - detailed information about the mission they were on, the roads they would travel, the campaigns they would undertake, and the weapon s at their disposal. The same holds true in business: a workforce needs cle ar and detailed information to execute a business strategy successfully. Until now, there haven't been many tools that can communicate both an organ ization's strategy and the processes and systems needed to implement that s trategy, But authors Robert Kaplan and David Norton, cocreators of the bala nced scorecard, have adapted that seminal tool to create strategy maps. Str ategy maps let an organization describe and illustrate-in clear and general language-its objectives, initiatives, targets markets, performance measure s, and the links between all the pieces of its strategy. Employees get a vi sual representation of how their jobs are tied to the company's overall goa ls, while managers get a clearer understanding of their strategies and a me ans to detect and correct any flaws in those plans. Using Mobil North American Marketing and Refining Company as an example, Ka plan and Norton walk through the creation of a strategy map and its four di stinct regions - financial, customer, internal process, and learning and gr owth-which correspond to the four perspectives of the balanced scorecard. T he authors show step by step how the Mobil division used the map to transfo rm itself from a centrally controlled manufacturer of commodity products to a decentralized, customer-driven organization.