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consistently, and responsively.
    Managers, however, do not have to choose between these two vital internal processes. The internal-business-process perspective of the Balanced Scorecard incorporates objectives and measures for both the longwave innovation cycle as well as the short-wave operations cycle. Chapter 5 contains many examples of how companies are formulating objectives and measures for the internal-business-process perspective.

Learning and Growth Perspective
    The fourth perspective of the Balanced Scorecard, learning and growth, identifies the infrastructure that the organization must build to create long-term growth and improvement. The customer and internal-business-process perspectives identify the factors most critical for current and future success. Businesses are unlikely to be able to meet their long-term targets for customers and internal processes using today’s technologies and capabilities. Also, intense global competition requires that companies continually improve their capabilities for delivering value to customers and shareholders.
    Organizational learning and growth come from three principal sources: people, systems, and organizational procedures. The financial, customer, and internal-business-process objectives on the Balanced Scorecard typically will reveal large gaps between the existing capabilities of people, systems, and procedures and what will be required to achieve breakthrough performance. To close these gaps, businesses will have to invest in reskilling employees, enhancing information technology and systems, and aligning organizational procedures and routines. These objectives are articulated in the learning and growth perspective of the Balanced Scorecard. As in the customer perspective, employee-based measures include a mixture of generic outcome measures—employee satisfaction, retention, training, and skills—along with specific drivers of these generic measures, such as detailed, business-specific indexes of the particular skills required for the new competitive environment. Information systems capabilities can be measured by realtime availability of accurate, critical customer and internal process information to employees on the front lines of decision making and actions. Organizational procedures can examine alignment of employee incentives with overall organizational success factors, and measured rates of improvement in critical customer-based and internal processes. These issues are explored in further detail in Chapter 6 .
    Altogether, the Balanced Scorecard translates vision and strategy into objectives and measures across a balanced set of perspectives. The scorecard includes measures of desired outcomes as well as processes that will drive the desired outcomes for the future.

LINKING MULTIPLE SCORECARD MEASURES TO A SINGLE STRATEGY
    Many companies may already be using a mixture of financial and nonfinancial measures, even in senior management reviews and to communicate with boards of directors. Especially in recent years, the renewed focus on customers and process quality has caused many organizations to track and communicate measures on customer satisfaction and complaints, product and process defect levels, and missed delivery dates. In France, companies have developed and used, for more than two decades, the
Tableau de Bord
, a dashboard of key indicators of organizational success. The
Tableau de Bord
is designed to help employees “pilot” the organization by identifying key success factors, especially those that can be measured as physical variables. 8 Does a dashboard of financial and nonfinancial indicators supply a “Balanced Scorecard?”
    Our experience is that the best Balanced Scorecards are more than collections of critical indicators or key success factors. The multiple measures on a properly constructed Balanced Scorecard should consist of a linked series of objectives and measures that are both consistent and mutually reinforcing. The metaphor should