Measuring Business Performance: Emerging Perspectives Of The Balanced Scorecard

Abstract

Benchmarking business performance over time is an emerging managerial capability that is used for continuous improvement of existing value adding activities and processes that become leading indicators of strategic success.  To achieve this success, corporations first define success, and then they decide how to get there from where they are presently.  Financial information has long been the language of business with accountants adding up the numbers and defining success in bottom-line figures.  What have been missing are the non-financial elements of business enterprises, elements that can be quantified and linked to the bottom line as predictors of financial success. This paper utilizes Kaplan & Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and an extensive pilot study of ski resorts to explore an awareness of using non-financial information as a supplement to financial information in explaining overall strategic performance in one segment of the tourism industry.

Leading and lagging indicators of a non-financial nature were used in the study to help focus on the strategic and operational management practices at selected ski resorts in Colorado, Montana, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest.  A list of potential critical success factors and non-critical success factors that help build value and best business practices for ski resort management, were identified through written and oral interview survey techniques following a combination Delphi & Nominal Group Techniques.  Previous work on the balanced scorecard by Kaplan and Norton aided in the identification and description of indicators within each of four balanced perspectives.  Recognition of the intuitive elements of non-financial measures represents a departure from prevalent theory that favors the more traditional financial perspective.