Are some countries better able to adopt the Balanced Scorecard than others?
The Nordic countries around Scandinavia love the Balanced Scorecard. It has swept through Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland. Somehow its holistic approach seems to match very well. They have a stakeholder perspective of employees, communities and the Balanced Scorecard provides a context. The worst performer? France, because they don’t want to take advice from people who don’t talk French. They think they invented it fifty years ago but it is actually just a bunch of KPIs (key performance indicators). It has been slow in Italy also, maybe because of what we were talking about earlier, the authoritarian approach of companies. How much of the Balanced Scorecard’s success is pure marketing? Very little. It is all substance. One way to judge the maturity of a concept in a country is by seeing who shows up at the conference. If most of the attendees are consultants, you are in the early stage of implementation because they are still trying to get the idea. The data shows that 50 per cent of
