Creating the office of strategy management

For the past 15 years, we have studied companies that achieved performance breakthroughs by placing the Balanced Scorecard as the centerpiece of a new strategy management system. The successful companies align their key management processes for effective strategy execution. Many of these companies have now sustained their focus on strategy execution by establishing a new corporate-level unit, an Office of Strategy Management (OSM). Not all organizations, however, have understood the need for a corporate-level office to align existing management processes to strategy. Companies, after developing Balanced Scorecards, often make a major error by continuing to plan, allocate resources, budget, report, communicate, and review performance as they had in the past.