Robert S. Kaplan
There are 20 articles for this faculty member.
About Faculty in this Article:
Robert S. Kaplan is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School.
Sharpening Your Skills: Leading Change
| Published: | June 29, 2009 |
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| Feature: | Sharpening Your Skills |
Nothing like a global recession to test your change-management skills. We dig deep into the Working Knowledge vault to learn about building a business in a down economy, motivating the troops, and other current topics.
Business Summit: Enterprise Risk Management
| Published: | June 9, 2009 |
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| Feature: | HBS Business Summit |
Risk management is a key to sustained firm growth, says professor Robert S. Kaplan. Key ingredients to a successful risk management program include the proper culture, clear parameters, discipline, measurement, and accountability.
Published in 2008
Strategy Execution and the Balanced Scorecard
| Q&A with: | Robert S. Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Published: | August 11, 2008 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Companies often manage strategy in fits and starts, with strategy execution lost along the way. A new book by Balanced Scorecard creators Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton aims to make strategy a continual process.
Published in 2007
Adding Time to Activity-Based Costing
| Q&A with: | Robert S. Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Published: | April 11, 2007 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Determining a company's true costs and profitability has always been difficult, although advancements such as activity-based costing (ABC) have helped. In a new book, Professor Robert Kaplan and Acorn Systems' Steven Anderson offer a simplified system based on time-driven ABC that leverages existing enterprise resource planning systems.
Published in 2006
The Demise of Cost and Profit Centers
| Author: | Robert S. Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Published: | December 20, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2006 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The Balanced Scorecard has proven to be a general and powerful performance management framework for units previously treated as profit and investment centers. The management control literature, however, identifies other organizational forms for decentralized units, including standard cost centers, revenue centers, and support units treated as discretionary expense centers. Starting from the example of a classic teaching case, Empire Glass Company, Kaplan explains how strategy maps and the Balanced Scorecard transform cost, revenue, and discretionary expense centers into strategic business units in their own right.
Managing Alignment as a Process
| Published: | April 24, 2006 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
"Most organizations attempt to create synergy, but in a fragmented, uncoordinated way," say HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan and colleague David P. Norton. Their new book excerpted here, Alignment, tells how to see alignment as a management process.
The Office of Strategy Management
| Q&A with: | Robert S. Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Published: | March 27, 2006 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Many organizations suffer a disconnect between strategy formulation and its execution. The answer? HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan and colleague Andrew Pateman argue for the creation of a new corporate office.
When Benchmarks Don't Work
| Published: | January 9, 2006 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Benchmarks have their virtues, but professor Robert S. Kaplan argues they should be saved for surveys of commoditized processes or services. From Balanced Scorecard Report.
Published in 2005
A Balanced Scorecard Approach To Measure Customer Profitability
| Published: | August 8, 2005 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Happy customers are good, but profitable customers are much better. In this article, professor and Balanced Scorecard guru Robert S. Kaplan introduces BSC Customer Profitability Metrics. From Balanced Scorecard Report.
Creating the Office of Strategy Management
| Authors: | Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | April 2005 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Organizations often fail to execute their strategy—failure rates may range as high as 60 to 90 percent. Successful companies align their key management processes for effective strategy execution. Creating a new corporate-unit level, the Office of Strategy Management (OSM), may help align management processes to strategy. The authors explain, among other topics, OSM core processes, desirable OSM processes, integrative processes, and positioning the OSM.
Rethinking Activity-Based Costing
| Published: | January 24, 2005 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Activity-based accounting looks great in the classroom, but too often fails in the field. In this Harvard Business Review excerpt, HBS professor Robert S. Kaplan along with Steven R. Anderson suggest a way around the obstacles.
Published in 2004
Mapping Your Board's Effectiveness
| Published: | August 30, 2004 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
To be effective, board members must understand their company’s strategy. Professor Robert S. Kaplan offers methods for using the Balanced Scorecard and strategy maps to increase board power. From Strategy & Innovation.
Mapping Your Corporate Strategy
| Q&A with: | Robert S. Kaplan |
|---|---|
| Published: | February 2, 2004 |
| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
From the originators of the Balanced Scorecard system, Strategy Maps is a new book that explores how companies can best their competition. A Q&A with Robert S. Kaplan.
Published in 2003
Improving Corporate Governance with the Balanced Scorecard
| Authors: | Robert S. Kaplan and Michael E. Nagel |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | December 2003 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
The authors review the key roles of corporate boards and recommend a Balanced Scorecard approach to help boards work smarter, not harder. Kaplan and Nagel recommend a three-part Balanced Scorecard program: Part 1: An Enterprise Scorecard that includes enterprise-wide strategic objectives, performance measures, targets, and initiatives; Part 2: A Board Scorecard that defines and clarifies the strategic contributions and requirements of the board, and provides a tool to manage the board's performance; Part 3: Executive Scorecards, which define strategic contributions of top management and are used to select, evaluate, and reward senior executives.
Boards and Corporate Governance: A Balanced Scorecard Approach
| Published: | November 24, 2003 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
HBS professors Robert S. Kaplan and Krishna G. Palepu discuss a Balanced Scorecard approach to how companies can create shareholder value through more effective governance.
Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing
| Authors: | Robert S. Kaplan and Steven R. Anderson |
|---|---|
| Published: | July 5, 2006 |
| Paper Release Date: | November 2003 |
| Feature: | Working Papers |
Activity-based costing (ABC) has become popular in business writing and management circles. (An example of an activity would be process customer complaints.) However, calculating baselines for activities, developing the model, and retesting the model once it is implemented is time-consuming and costly. Kaplan and Anderson developed improvements in the process through what they call time-driven ABC. Time-driven ABC decreases the amount of data needed, and only requires estimates of two things: (1) the practical capacity of committed resources and their cost, and (2) unit times for performing transactional activities.
Keeping Your Balance With Customers
| Published: | July 14, 2003 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Using the Balanced Scorecard approach, Robert S. Kaplan, of Harvard Business School, and David P. Norton analyze the four essentials of customer management: customer selection, acquisition, retention, and growth.
Expensing Options Won’t Hurt High Tech
| Published: | May 19, 2003 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Will expensing stock options harm the competitiveness of start-ups? Not likely, say Zvi Bodie, Robert S. Kaplan, and Robert C. Merton in this Harvard Business Review excerpt.
Published in 2002
Partnering and the Balanced Scorecard
| Published: | December 23, 2002 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
Created in 1992, the Balanced Scorecard has become an effective tool for managing strategy. Now authors Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton propose using it to communicate values and vision to employees and partners. The payoff? Better strategic relationships with partners.
Published in 2000
The Strategy-Focused Organization
| Published: | October 23, 2000 |
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| Feature: | Research & Ideas |
In the ten years since it was introduced, Robert Kaplan's and David Norton's Balanced Scorecard has become not just a measurement tool but a means of putting strategy at the center of a company's key management processes and systems.
