Organizations often adopt various strategies geared towards enhancing their productive capacity. This study shows how Futura Company under the leadership of Susan Johnson chose to adopt the learning and growth dimensions. In most instances, the balanced scorecard has four quadrants each offering options that an organization can adopt for it to succeed. In the end, the company succeeded from the strategies adopted by the manager.
Balance Scorecard for Fatura
Business organizations operate with the sole objective of effectively utilizing the input factors in order to maximize on the output. For this case, output is measured in terms of performance, which, essentially relates to the profits or customer satisfaction. In the industrial age, most managers relied heavily on conventional financial metrics as the only strategic measure to align the activities of the organization to the goals and objectives of the same organization. However, this perspective has gradually shifted in the information age. Balanced scorecard is the most recent strategic tool that most organizations currently use in their planning and management activities. It is crucial as far as the alignment of the business activities to the objectives of the firm, boost both internal and external communications, and assess the organization performance relative to strategic goals. BSC is classified into four quadrants that include customer, financial, internal business processes, and learning and growth (Kaplan, & Norton, 2004). In this paper, Futura Industries is used as the case study. The study explores reasons that made Susan Johnson, Futura president to prefer the learning and growth dimension to the other dimensions present in the balanced scorecard.
Analysis:
It is notable that Futura Company performed exemplary well between the years 1996 and 1999. Unlike most other companies that focus on operational and financial metrics aspects of BSC, Futura went a notch higher to concentrate also on the learning, innovation, and growth dimensions. Evidently, Susan Johnson understood the value of the intangible capital in transforming the fortunes of any organizations. The conventional means of strategizing for organization performance were based on the financial metrics. However, this strategy has limitations as it can hardly compete favorably in the era of information and technology where knowledge, instead of financial empowerment is emphasized. This belief must have driven Johnson to focus her effort on developing the BSC's foundations, which include learning, innovation, and growth dimension before focusing on other perspectives. According to her, the growth of the other perspectives bears direct linkage to the developments experienced at the foundational levels (Gumbus & Johnson, 2003).
Companies learning and growth perspective encompasses human capital, information capital, and organizational capital (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). Futura Company considers and analyzes each of these elements to evaluate the degree of leaning and growth of the company. Concerning the human capital, the management team of this company understands that knowledge occupies a central position on the performance of an organization. This knowledge must be diverse and possessed by most, if not all of the employees of the organization. It is worth noting that this knowledge directly translates to the variety of skills that the employees of this company exhibit. For the case of Futura, the company has successful managed to implement advanced production processes basing on the pool of skilled personnel it attracted and retained. The other aspect of learning and growth is the information capital. This aspect measures the ability of a firm to provide tools like technology that are indispensable in the achievement of goals and strategies put in place (Niven, (N.D).
Concerning Futura Company, the executive can boost of the fact that it has successfully implemented the latest technological requirements in its production, marketing, and communication processes. The company has been able to expand its market size beyond the borders by simply apply customer service through the advancement of the internet technology. Finally is the organizational capital. Paul Niven describes this aspect as the hearts and minds. In other words, organizational capital describes the spirit of the workforce that mostly relates to motivation. For the case of Futura, the motivational level is remarkably high. The employees derive a sense of pride in the company and as such offer their optimum service to customers. This aspect is measured by the rate, coordination, and output of work done. Furthermore, feedback from customers as far as customer relations are concerned adds to the parameters that are considered (Kaplan, & Norton, 2004). All the above aspects can be confirmed by the ISO certification that the firm received.
Conclusion:
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