Looking back on the development of management theory since 1990s, the balanced scorecard has undoubtedly played an important role. Robert Kaplan, one of its inventors and a professor at Harvard Business School, is an excellent accounting scholar. He once invented the famous activity-based costing (ABC) in accounting. As an accounting professor, Kaplan is well aware of the limitations of using financial data to reflect the achievements of enterprise value creation: these data based on past activities are deceptive and very one-sided, and it ignores all important aspects that cannot be quantified financially. For example, two CEOs, one was the company's profit growth100000; However, the performance of the other company in the financial report of that year was not optimistic, and its profit decreased by120,000 yuan compared with the previous year. So, the first CEO performed better. This is simply considering the wrong direction brought by financial performance, ignoring other important aspects of the company's operation. If the actual situation is that the first CEO dissolved a promising new business department of the company and sold their office building in order to hand over a beautiful report card before retirement, thus gaining an additional 20 million non-operating income; The second CEO is leading his team to deepen the market. Not only did he open 65,438+00 regional branches, but his market share increased by 20% and he also won 2 million new customers. This year, he invested heavily, and his profits naturally decreased, but it was of great benefit to the future. So, who is the really good CEO? This small example may make today's top managers feel naive, but it is a microcosm of the problems that people may encounter when trying to get rid of the limitation of simply reflecting the value of enterprises with financial indicators. The traditional financial accounting model can only measure what happened in the past. In the industrial age, the management mode centered on financial indicators is still applicable; However, in the information society, when the value of intangible assets exceeds tangible assets more and more, the disadvantages of reflecting enterprise performance only by accounting are increasingly obvious. A company must invest in customers, suppliers, employees, organizational processes, technology and innovation in order to obtain the motive force of sustainable development. Enterprise development is a systematic and balanced process, therefore, any single and rude evaluation method will lead to inappropriate wrong orientation. Therefore, based on the re-understanding of enterprise values-enterprises are no longer just the main body that pursues profits, but the main body that provides value for customers, shareholders, employees, communities and even society, the pursuit of a four-dimensional balance among finance, customers, internal processes and organizational learning and growth has become the basis for the existence and development of enterprises. 1992, Kaplan and his collaborator David Naughton published their first epoch-making paper, Balanced Scorecard: Evaluation Index of Driving Performance, which marked the birth of Balanced Scorecard. In the early 1990s, for most enterprises, the balanced scorecard was just a tool to measure organizational performance. Since 1996 was introduced to China, the balanced scorecard has been used as a performance management tool in practical application, but it is not linked with strategy, so performance evaluation has become aimless. With the continuous improvement and innovation of the concept of balanced scorecard in practice, Kaplan and Norton began to develop the balanced scorecard into a strategic management tool from their first monograph "Balanced Scorecard-Turning Strategy into Action", because high performance is only the result of successful strategy implementation, and management from the source can really solve organizational problems. The balanced scorecard method corrects the imbalance of one-dimensional evaluation from four aspects, and realizes the balance between external and internal, required results and their implementation motivation, quantitative and qualitative, short-term goals and long-term goals. It is the goal of enterprise strategy to change the enterprise from a single pursuit of profit to a real concern for the growth of the organization. Although the balanced scorecard has many advantages, it is a very "useful" tool in practice, but it is not an "easy to use" tool. For example, some items in the balanced scorecard are difficult to describe or measure clearly, and the establishment of non-financial indicators is such a difficult problem. When the organizational strategy or structure changes, the balanced scorecard should be adjusted accordingly. At the same time, it takes a lot of time and resources to keep the balanced scorecard updated and effective in real time. Another disadvantage of the balanced scorecard is that it is difficult to implement. A typical balanced scorecard takes 5 ~ 6 months to implement, and it takes several months to adjust the structure and make it regular. Therefore, the total development time often takes one year or more. Although managers usually understand the relationship among customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction and financial performance, the balanced scorecard can't guide managers to improve their performance, so as to achieve the expected strategic goals.