The Balanced Scorecard is overrated and outdated. Here is the alternative.

In the field of performance measurement, one sentence stands as a rule of thumb: “What you measure is what you get.” In companies, what is not measured cannot be managed. As such, the Balanced Scorecard’s emergence was a significant revolution that shifted companies’ focus from a purely financial approach to a more “balanced” approach that considers the operational levers of performance and all the key stakeholders of every company (Shareholders, Customers, and Employees). The Balanced Scorecard was popularized in the 1990s by Kaplan and Norton. Since then, many things have changed in the business landscape. The emergence of sustainability concerns linked to the industrial era’s reckless behaviors led to the development and adoption of sustainability scorecards. In this essay, we will present Balanced and Sustainability Scorecards, and the critics elaborated on them.

The Balanced Scorecard

In his famous book Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman wrote: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business — to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.” This view shaped the way we perceive companies and how…