Top business thinker Robert Kaplan will be the Park/Bangs lecturer

By Linda Myers

Robert S. Kaplan, who was named one of the top 25 business thinkers by The Financial Times for his "balanced scorecard" approach to improving corporate valuation and performance, will deliver a lecture at Cornell, Tuesday, Nov. 11, at 4:30 p.m. in 155 Olin Hall.

Kaplan

Kaplan's talk, "Integrating Intangible Assets in Corporate Value Creation," is free and open to the public. It is both a Roy H. Park Leadership Speaker lecture and a John R. Bangs Jr. Memorial lecture and is jointly sponsored by the Johnson Graduate School of Management and the School of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering (ORIE) in the College of Engineering.

Kaplan, who earned his Ph.D. at Cornell in operations research in 1968, is the Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School. His recent research -- at the intersection of managerial accounting, strategy and operations -- links cost and performance management systems to business strategy and operations. The balanced scorecard approach developed by Kaplan looks at such non-financial measures as customer retention and employee capabilities as well as the more-standard ROI (return on investment) and EVA (economic value added) valuation techniques for companies.

The scorecard, now being used by companies, nonprofits and private-sector organizations, is designed to be used as a framework for everything from compensation to resource allocation to individual and team goal setting.

In addition, Kaplan currently is at work on a new and, he says, much-enhanced version of activity-based costing (ABC), which he pioneered in 1988. He was cited in The Economist this Oct. 25 for being "the only man currently to be credited with developing two top management tools."

Kaplan is co-author (with David Norton) of The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, which won the 2001 Wildman Medal for its impact on accounting practice by the American Accounting Association and has been translated into 21 languages; and The Strategy-Focused Organization: How Balanced Scorecard Companies Thrive in the New Business Environment, which was named the best international business book in 2000 by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young and has been translated into 17 languages. He has published frequently in the Harvard Business Review and other journals. Strategy Maps, his latest book, will be published in 2004 by HBS Press.

"He has made it a premier activity to evaluate the firm more globally, measuring a firm's performance continuously on multiple dimensions, including customer satisfaction, innovation, learning and operations as well as on both the traditional and newest methods of financial performance," said Thomas Dyckman, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Accounting at the Johnson School.

"Bob has shown that measuring businesses in ways that were often omitted from conventional accounting can help guide employees towards creating value," said Mark Eisner, associate director of ORIE and a former doctoral classmate of Kaplan's at Cornell who, early on, collaborated with him on research published in Management Science.

During his campus visit Nov. 10-12, Kaplan will meet with management and operations research students and faculty at the Johnson School and ORIE as well as with the deans of the Johnson School and the College of Engineering.

Before joining Harvard in 1984, Kaplan was dean of Carnegie Mellon University's Graduate School of Industrial Administration as well as a faculty member there. He has won numerous academic awards, among them the AAA's Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1988 and the Institute of Management Accountants Distinguished Service Award in 2001.

The Park Leadership Speaker series was established in 1998 to honor the late Roy H. Park Sr. and is supported by the Triad Foundation. The Bangs Memorial Lecture series was established in 1990 to honor the late John R. Bangs, Cornell M.E. '21, an engineering faculty member who pioneered the program that led to today's ORIE. The lectures are funded largely by gifts from Bangs' former students.