Balanced Scorecard the Company That I Am

Balanced Scorecard

The company that I am going to study is Google. This company makes most of its money from online advertising. While it has a wide range of different services and products -- Android and Chrome being to prominent ones -- advertising is where it makes its money. The mission of Google is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful" (Google.com, 2013). The company does not have an explicit vision statement. It competes on a differentiated strategy. This means that it seeks to sell more ads than its competitors by delivering the most eyeballs, but also by being able to provide significant data about those eyeballs. Google sells ads, therefore, by allowing its customer to better target their ads, something that adds value. Competing on value-added is typically associated with a differentiated strategy.

Google has a rather exceptional financial situation, in that it is wildly profitable. As a result, it has an exceptionally healthy balance sheet that features some $50 billion in cash (MSN Moneycentral, 2013). This gives the company an interesting perspective compared with most companies it that it really does not need to make money. It also highlights something interesting about the way the company approaches the financial perspective. Google does not make profit any part of its mission. Rather, it takes the philosophy of making good products and then the profits will follow. Thus far, that has been the case at least in terms of its advertising business. Google has developed industry-leading technologies in Android and Chrome but has yet to figure out how to make money from those.

Google is also famous for its human resources policies. It has been listed as the best place to work in America (Forbes, 2013). This is because of the considerable investment that Google puts into its employees, creating an environment for them to do their best work (Stewart, 2013). The company provides ample training opportunities as well, seemingly excelling in the learning and growth perspective. Clearly, Google feels that this is a critical element in its strategy.

With respect to the internal operations strategy, Google takes an informal view of operational processes. This seems to work well for the company, in terms of building incremental improvements onto existing projects but also with respect to excelling at project management. The approach might be unorthodox but it works well for the company. That it has been so successful is a good reason to study it, especially since it runs against a lot of conventional management doctrine that emphasizes formality and measurement. Indeed, Google's approach to internal operations appears more consistent with a creative company than one staff mainly be engineers, and it definitely runs against the spirit of the balanced scorecard.