Here at Ascendant, we're measurement geeks. We like things that can be quantified, explained, and analyzed. We like to understand what's driving behavior, and we like to say "what gets measured gets managed." So it's really interesting when we do work in healthcare and education. Because, despite the massive amount of measurement in both of those sectors, there's truly a paucity of management. Why is that?

It's hard to believe, but we're already planning for the 2013 Mission-Driven Management Summit, just a short nine months away! We're returning to the fabulous National Press Club in Washington, DC on March 5-6, 2013. With that in mind, we're putting out a general "call for speakers" to present at next year's conference.

For private sector organizations, it's usually pretty easy to figure out the ultimate measure of success -- it's usually some proxy for profitability -- either earnings per share, revenue growth, or share of market. But for the clients we work with, it's often a bit harder. While we can usually define the strategic objective pretty clearly, it's harder to define the measure behind it.

At Ascendant, when we work with the executives and managers of mission-driven organizations to help them develop and implement their Balanced Scorecards (BSC), we are often asked the question: "How do we get staff engaged?"

While sometimes this question comes up when developing the strategy map, measures, and initiatives, it also arises once these pieces of the BSC are complete and leaders want to know what's next.

At Ascendant, of course we use a Balanced Scorecard, and we have from day 1. We also hold quarterly strategy review meetings and we update our strategy map and measures each year in an annual review. Our strategy has not changed dramatically each year, but we do tend to tweak our measures on an annual basis. One thing that we have been working on is how to measure our software line of business, ClearPoint Strategy.

Recently, as we were helping a client design and implement their balanced scorecard, they asked us for helping in aligning their budget to their strategy. The thinking was that if they were going to take the time and effort to implement a strategy management system across a large organization, they wanted to ensure they were funding strategic initiatives.

They explained their budget as "cost-plus," meaning that each year the finances are divided up the same way as the previous year, with any additional dollars added on top of that and that no unit's budget varied by more than +/- 5%. In this budget environment and as they were beginning their budget cycle, the client wanted to know what they could do to make their budget process more strategic.

Thank you to all the attendees of this year's Mission-Driven Management Summit! The event, held March 6-8th at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, brought together speakers and organizations from around the world to hear case studies and participate in interactive sessions designed to help make the connection between strategy and execution, as well as reach peak performance within an organization.

The 2012 Mission-Driven Management Summit is just a few weeks away, so I wanted to offer ten reasons you should register today (if you haven't already):

I was reading an ExtremeTech article today titled "Lies, damned lies, and benchmarks." The article was about measuring performance in mobile phones, which isn't all that interesting to me, but I started thinking about some of the concepts in the article and how they related to the Balanced Scorecard. The author, Joel Hruska, threw in a chart about Accuracy vs Precision that I thought was particularly relevant.

Earlier on this blog we discussed the keys to successful implementation of a government Balanced Scorecard. Leadership, communication and stakeholder engagement are the keys to success. A major challenge, however, is finding the right measures for your government Balanced Scorecard. It is important to find measures appropriate for the level of government, measures that can illustrate cause and effect linkages and those that can drive action at the right level.