We recently returned from Digital Now 2009, an executive leadership conference focused on association leadership in the digital age. At Digital Now, we presented with Project Management Institute and American Society of Mechanical Engineers on how the Balanced Scorecard can be used to drive change and innovation in associations.

One of the great things about Digital Now is the collection of great speakers they line up each year. This year, we were fortunate enough to hear from Clay Shirky, Amber MacArthur, and Charlene Li.

A key thread throughout all the presentations was the massive change in process in organizations throughout the world. No longer can organizations survive as data islands in a command and control environment. Instead, organizations must become more flexible, more integrated with their customers, and more open to survive.

Best Buy was used as an example by several of the presenters as an organization that's "getting it right." A key reason that Best Buy (a Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame award winner, by the way) is getting it right is that Best Buy is almost fanatical about listening to their customers and their employees on the front line.

This listening, learning, and responding loop at Best Buy is facilitated by a lot of the same technologies that are becoming central to the web today -- wikis, online discussions, peer networks, etc. Best Buy also realized that they need to empower their employees to make decisions and learn from each other.

It's fascinating to me to see how a Balanced Scorecard organization like Best Buy can do this. The Balanced Scorecard has sometimes been criticized as too "command and control" focused with its emphasis on measurement and analysis.

But Best Buy is showing us how getting the right information to the right people, learning from experiments that might fail, and having a system in place that percolates knowledge up (and across) to decisionmakers is critical. And done right, that's just what the Balanced Scorecard can do.