Practitioners' Opinions on Academics' Critics on the Balanced Scorecard

Abstract

This article presents a survey on the critics to the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) implementation in private organizations and the opinion of Brazilian executives from three different enterprises about these critics. As for Kaplan and Norton (1997) proposal, some outlines were not followed by the interviewed companies, such as the broad communication of BSC to employees and the budget process integration (still prevailing) to the strategic planning. The analysis of the model's critiques led to the elaboration of 18 questions. This questionnaire is a useful management tool that can be applied by both practitioners and researchers to access and/or compare the BSC implementation in different organizations. The managers agreed with at least one third of these critics. For instance, interviewees agree that cause-and-effect linear relation tends to simplify reality. Also, financial measures are still more important than those non-financial. As the major explanation for the BSC implementation is exactly to reduce the emphasis on the assistance of financial measures, this issue will continue to be discussed.

Keywords: Balanced Scorecard, strategy implementation, management control systems, performance measurement, accounting systems

JEL Classification: M00, M10, M40, M41