Tableau de Bord and Balanced Scorecard - Essay Example

Currently, much attention is given to strategic measurement systems with the balanced scorecard as the far most high profile. This US-born approach has not been very warmly welcomed in France where tableau de bord, a French strategic measurement system, has been used for at least 50 years. The differences between both approaches have been variously discussed. This paper investigates the cultural and ideological hypotheses founding both methods, which may explain their differences as well as the climate surrounding the debate. This broadens up the usual perspective regarding performance measurement systems, which are usually implemented with respect to their strategic and organizational relevance - their cultural and ideological backgrounds being generally disregarded. In addition, this analysis provides some insight into the more general question of the transferability of management methods.

Over 20 years ago Steven Kerr wrote an article entitled “On the Folly of Hoping for A and Rewarding B”. The paper, now considered a “classic”, described how many companies' performance measurement systems were rewarding different behaviors than the ones they hoped to obtain from their employees. This issue has received much attention over the last few years. In particular, Robert Kaplan and David Norton have published a series of three Harvard Business Review articles proposing a specific framework, called Balanced Scorecard, to facilitate the translation of strategy into action.

The Balanced Scorecard approach to management control, as developed by [The Balanced Scorecard: measures that drive performance. Harvard Bus. Rev. 1992 (January–February) 71], has generated a great deal of interest, at least in academic circles and in consulting firms, and it has been promoted by its authors as a novelty. This is surprising for French accounting scholars and practitioners who developed a similar technique in the 1930s called the Tableau de bord. This paper critically analyzes the Balanced Scorecard and the Tableau de bord using a constructivist approach. A constructivist approach is based on three key concepts. First, there is the concept of a dialectic subject-object–project (instead of the more typical dialectic between subject and object).