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Editor's letter.

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Vincent
PositionBrief Article - Editorial

There are many new management techniques that promise to revolutionise the way companies are managed while boosting profits, increasing communication and delivering everything else that employees, shareholders and managers could want. In the past few years we have seen a number of holy grails emerge -- from activity-based management to enterprise resource planning. All fit tidily into three-letter acronyms and spawn huge numbers of books, articles, conferences and seminars. In most cases, these techniques are nothing more than good practice put into words; just occasionally, they are based on a great idea that really promises to add something new.

The balanced scorecard, introduced a decade ago by Robert Kaplan, was one of these and was described by Harvard Business Review as "among the most influential management ideas in the past 75 years". But even this had its limitations. Too often senior managers embrace new theories, pay a consultant to implement them and become disillusioned when the benefits don't appear straight away. Kaplan recognised this, and is now looking into how to make strategy work -- often much harder than formulating it in the first place (page 20).

One reason innovations fail is that new management schemes take time to get established. Employees need to buy in to the idea and processes have to be adapted (page 24). Such techniques are not quick fixes -- they encourage you to ask the questions that a consultant would ask: what are we in business to do? How can we...

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