The balanced scorecard is a performance measurement tool developed in 1992 by Harvard Business School professor Robert S. Kaplan and management consultant David P. Norton. Kaplan and Norton's research led them to believe that traditional financial measures, like return on investment, could not provide an accurate picture of a company's performance in the innovative business environment of the 1990s. Rather than forcing managers to choose between "hard" financial measures and "soft" operational measures—such as customer retention, product development cycle times, or employee satisfaction—they developed a method that would allow managers to consider both types of measures in a balanced way. "The balanced scorecard includes financial measures that tell the results of actions already taken," Kaplan and Norton explained in the seminal 1992 Harvard Business Review article that launched the balanced scorecard methodology. "And it...