The economy is swinging up and down and municipal governments are feeling the pressure. Cities and counties have had to "cut the fat" for at least the last three years.

As a participant at the recent Florida Benchmarking Consortium conference in Winter Park, Florida, I had the opportunity to listen in while managers reported their top concerns and brainstormed potential solutions. Some of these threats and/or weaknesses are specific to government while others apply more broadly.

Do any of the challenges relate to your organization? Have you found any other solutions?

Helping a mission-driven organization develop its Balanced Scorecard and implement its strategy is always a long, arduous journey with its share of unique challenges. When you start with a division or region of a large organization that is trying to be the early adopter, additional challenges and question arise around the fact that very little, if any, guidance is given because the organization may not yet know the full rules of engagement.

Some leaders see this as a reason to go slow and be careful, while other--I would argue more visionary--leaders view it as an opportunity to blaze the trail and set the rules for others to follow. An additional level of complexity, and second-guessing, may be added if the organization is the largest multilateral development agency in the world. This interesting scenario is playing out right now with a client of ours, the World Bank.

This is a guest blog from Roslyn Tam. The original can be found at www.educationalleadership.com.

Many of the men and women who shaped the world over the course of history, from Mozart to Albert Einstein to Steve Jobs, have done so by thinking well outside the sphere of traditional education. Famously, each of these men had some issues with authority, and it's hard to imagine any of them sitting placidly in a classroom and copying facts and figures from a chalkboard. In the end, their genius was not simply in their ability to understand complex systems, although that was certainly an important part of it. What set them apart was their creativity--that is, their ability to use previously held knowledge to produce something that no one had ever thought to make before; whether a symphony, a scientific theory or a personal computer.

The phrases "Citizen Outreach" and "Voice of the Customer" have been popular topics over the past few weeks. The trend started at an Alliance for Innovation Conference in Kansas City.

In a previous post, I briefly discussed my work with the Joining Forces Community Challenge, and the great privilege it was to contribute to an effort in support of our nation's veterans and military families. As a quick recap, the Joining Forces Community Challenge was launched in July 2011 by First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Biden in an effort to recognize and celebrate those citizens and organizations with a demonstrated, genuine, and deep desire to be of service and improve the lives of our military families. The Challenge concluded on April 11th, with a celebration at the White House to announce the five winners and one people's choice nomination.

We got a little pushback on our job description that we posted last week (see it here). People thought that we were either being too honest (potentially chasing off applications), too blunt (scaring people off in the process), or somehow not being sensitive enough to the needs of potential applicants for our position. I think all of those are true. And intentional.

Ascendant Strategy Management Group is looking for a marketing manager in the Washington, DC area to support our rapidly growing social enterprise. As a marketing manager with Ascendant, you'll help us expand our presence by overseeing a wide portfolio of branding and marketing activities, including public relations, e-marketing, social media, collateral design and content writing, plus large conferences too.

At Ascendant, of course we use a Balanced Scorecard, and we have from day 1. We also hold quarterly strategy review meetings and we update our strategy map and measures each year in an annual review. Our strategy has not changed dramatically each year, but we do tend to tweak our measures on an annual basis. One thing that we have been working on is how to measure our software line of business, ClearPoint Strategy.

Recently, as we were helping a client design and implement their balanced scorecard, they asked us for helping in aligning their budget to their strategy. The thinking was that if they were going to take the time and effort to implement a strategy management system across a large organization, they wanted to ensure they were funding strategic initiatives.

They explained their budget as "cost-plus," meaning that each year the finances are divided up the same way as the previous year, with any additional dollars added on top of that and that no unit's budget varied by more than +/- 5%. In this budget environment and as they were beginning their budget cycle, the client wanted to know what they could do to make their budget process more strategic.

Have you ever be dependent upon the success of a strategic partnership to achieve your own organizations mission? How did it work? Did leadership trust one another or did they blame each other for not carrying their weight? Were there shared objectives or competition for scarce resources? Was there respect for the mixture of talent or lack of appreciation for what the partner is doing? Recently, I was asked how a Balanced Scorecard or any performance management system might be used to align a somewhat challenging strategic partner with a strategy. Most think that measures immediately become divisive and foster competition which would only exacerbate a tense relationship. But, I would contend that establishing shared measures to which two or more partners agree is a powerful way to align efforts toward shared objectives.