Dr. David P. Norton

Dr. David P. Norton's Key Accomplishments Include . . .
Dr. David P. Norton is founder and director of several organizations specializing in systems and processes to improve the execution of business strategy. Dr. Norton has founded and built a series of professional service firms during the course of his career, each focused on leading edge issues of management, from information technology and knowledge management to the discipline of strategy management.

A frequent lecturer and author, Dr. Norton is best known for his work with the Balanced Scorecard, which has been the subject of many conferences and articles.  He is the co-author, with Robert S. Kaplan, of eight Harvard Business Review (HBR) articles and five books:
The Balanced Scorecard, The Strategy Focused Organization, Strategy Maps, Alignment and The Execution Premium.

His books have sold more than one million copies in 23 different languages.

The Balanced Scorecard concept was selected by the editors of the Harvard Business Review as one of the most influential management ideas of the past 75 years.  Dr. Norton was voted on as one of the “World’s 12 Most Influential Management Thinkers” by Sun Top Media’s Thinkers 50.  Drs. Norton and Kaplan were recently honored with the “Champion of Workplace Learning and Performance Award” by the ASTD (The American Society for Training and Development).

Dr. Norton earned a BS in electrical engineering from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, an MS in operations research from the Florida Institute of Technology, an MBA from Florida State University, and his doctorate in business administration from Harvard Business School.

More About Dr. David P. Norton. . .
David P. Norton is the preeminent authority, along with Robert Kaplan, on how to institutionalize strategic thinking using The Balanced Scorecard (BSC). Dr. Norton co-developed this extraordinary tool for defining and executing business strategy. He coauthored with Kaplan the three essential books on The Balanced Scorecard. Dr. Norton is also the co-founder, president and CEO of the consulting firm that helps organizations use the BSC successfully. In his presentations, Dr. Norton helps companies make effective strategic thinking and execution an essential part of their business, both at the top (through the equivalent of a Chief Strategy Officer) and throughout the organization. An effective speaker who loves doing keynotes, David Norton is one of the most significant figures transforming business today.

Utilizing the Balanced Scorecard concept, Dr. Norton allows complex organizations to effectively clarify, manage and implement their business strategies with a rigor never possible before. Dr. Norton's first book, The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy Into Action, shows managers how to use this revolutionary tool to guide their strategic investments in people, systems and new products for long-term growth. His second book, The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment, illustrates how the most successful BSC adopters have used the tool to achieve their extraordinary performance. This best-practices guide builds on ten years of research into more than 200 Balanced Scorecard companies. In his book, Strategy Maps: Converting Intangible Assets into Tangible Outcomes, Dr. Norton helps companies link their key internal processes to desired outcomes and align people, processes, and information technology for superior performance. In the fourth book, Alignment, authors David Norton and Robert Kaplan apply their revolutionary Balanced Scorecard management system to corporate-level strategy, revealing how highly successful enterprises achieve powerful synergies by explicitly defining corporate headquarters’ role in setting, coordinating, and overseeing organizational strategy. Alignment shows how today’s companies can unlock unrealized value from enterprise synergies. The latest book, The Execution Premium, builds on Kaplan and Norton’s breakthrough works on strategy-focused organizations. Dr. Kaplan and Dr. Norton describe a multistage system that enables organizations to gain measurable benefits from carefully formulated business strategies. Together, these books and the presentations based on them, represent some of the most valuable breakthroughs in business strategy in recent times.

Dr. David Norton's research and lectures have tremendous value for any company seeking to plan and sustain value creation over the long term. Dr. Norton has extremely broad and practical experience working with companies of all kinds and at all levels on their strategic capabilities. And he has unusual depth in developing the strategic potential of human resources.

• The Execution Premium: Building an organization that executes its strategy
  

  Most organizations have difficulty executing their strategies. Over the past decade, a new breed of organizations, using the Balanced Scorecard approach to management, has mastered this challenge. They have successfully executed their strategies and have created breakthrough results. From these companies, we have observed a consistent set of management practices. This body of knowledge for strategy management can be learned and transferred. In this session, Dr. Norton will describe the new science of strategy execution and show how you can build such a core competency for your own organization.

• Developing and clarifying your strategy
  

  The integrated strategy execution process begins with strategy development. Learn how to apply tools and processes such as mission/vision/values statements, SWOT analysis, competitive positioning, and core competencies to formulate a set of strategic directions.

• Translating and planning your strategy
  

  Having trouble with your strategy? Then map it! Strategy maps provide a logical architecture for describing strategy by devolving it into a linked set of objectives across four perspectives: financial, customer, internal, and learning and growth. The scorecard operationalizes those objectives by translating them into meaningful measures, targets and initiatives. Dr. Norton will describe best practice strategy map and scorecard design, based on an extensive database of hundreds of scorecard implementations.

• Organization Alignment: How to achieve rapid results from your strategy
  

  Throughout business history, corporations have attempted to unlock value by matching their structures totheir strategies. Two business models – centralized by function versus decentralized by product and region – proved durable for a long time, largely because the evolution of business organization was fairly incremental. But as the economic model changed over the past 25 years, problems with both structures become apparent and companies have searched for new ways to organize themselves. Dr. Norton will describe, from his new book, Alignment, how organizations use the architecture of strategic themes and strategy maps to overlay traditional organization structures with strategic focus tied to their management system.

• Aligning your intangible assets
  

  In spite of the critical role played by Human Resources, IT, Ffinance and other support functions in an organization’s strategy, research shows that two-thirds of support organizations are not aligned with the strategy. Dr. Norton will show how many organizations, using strategy maps and balanced scorecards, have created integrated planning and management processes to achieve this alignment and to achieve dramatic performance improvements.

• Linking strategy and operations
  

  Successful strategy execution requires that long-term strategy be linked to short-term actions and accountability. Experience has shown that organizations get better results if they link operational improvement programs like Six Sigma, Best Practice, Customer Management, etc. to their strategies. Dr. Norton will describe an approach based on cross-business accountability (a “theme team”), process redesign, KPI dashboards and technology infrastructure to create this bridge.

• Monitoring, learning and adapting your strategy
  

  Strategy is a hypothesis – It’s the best guess at a point in time of the actions that will create desired results. The hypothesis of the strategy must be executed and tested continuously. Dr. Norton describes how the monthly management review meetings and the annual analytic review can help accelerate organization learning and make strategy a continual process.

• The Office of Strategy Management: What it is and why you need one
  

  Every organization should create an Office of Strategic Management (OSM) and designate a Strategic Management Officer. This session provides a roadmap to continue your journey to becoming a Strategy-Focused Organization and is based on the BSC Best Practices Model. Dr. Norton will share what he’s learned from his pioneering OSM research program, focusing on the critical processes you must unite under the OSM umbrella to achieve cross-business integration.

"Our strategy maps and balanced scorecards are invaluable to ensure that all our people, from the most senior to the lowest level employees, understand our direction and their individual and team contributions. Our Balanced Scorecard review process ensures that we are on track with our targets, or take counter measures where necessary. As a result, we have experienced continuous growth in business and continuous improvement in our operations, as well as increased customer satisfaction."

--- Sam Ichioka, Chairman & CEO, Ricoh Corporation