Measuring Business Performance: Emerging Perspectives Of The Balanced Scorecard

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<p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Benchmarking business performance over time is an emerging managerial capability that is used for continuous improvement of existing value adding activities and processes that become leading indicators of strategic success.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>To achieve this success, corporations first define success, and then they decide how to get there from where they are presently.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Financial information has long been the language of business with accountants adding up the numbers and defining success in bottom-line figures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>What have been missing are the non-financial elements of business enterprises, elements that can be quantified and linked to the bottom line as predictors of financial success. This paper utilizes Kaplan & Norton’s Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and an extensive pilot study of ski resorts to explore an awareness of using non-financial information as a supplement to financial information in explaining overall strategic performance in one segment of the tourism industry. </span></span></p><p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-align: justify; margin: 0in 0.5in 0pt;"><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman;">Leading and lagging indicators of a non-financial nature were used in the study to help focus on the strategic and operational management practices at selected ski resorts in Colorado, Montana, Canada, and the Pacific Northwest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>A list of potential critical success factors and non-critical success factors that help build value and best business practices for ski resort management, were identified through written and oral interview survey techniques following a combination Delphi & Nominal Group Techniques.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Previous work on the balanced scorecard by Kaplan and Norton aided in the identification and description of indicators within each of four balanced perspectives.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">  </span>Recognition of the intuitive elements of non-financial measures represents a departure from prevalent theory that favors the more traditional financial perspective.</span></span></p>