Last week, over 120 social and public sector leaders from across the world, including Russia, the UK, South Africa, Tunisia, and Finland convened in Washington, D.C., to discuss ways to more effectively manage their organizations' strategy.

It is hard not to get excited about the Mission-Driven Performance Summit that starts tomorrow in Washington, DC. Drs. Norton and Kaplan are great key notes when it comes to understanding and applying leading edge thinking around the topic of strategy management. There are clinics on Tuesday and then great case studes on Wednesday and Thursday. Over 100 people are registered to attend.

Ten years ago, the Atlanta Public Schools (APS) had low and declining student achievement, demoralized teachers, crumbling buildings, high turnover among superintendents (average tenure of two years) and disaffected parents pulling their children out of the system. More than 60 percent of the city's high school students missed at least two weeks of school per year, and the district had more than 700 teaching vacancies. The system was failing its students and stakeholders. Fast forward 10 years, and Atlanta has reversed its dismal numbers.

This post continues my thinking on running a successful Balanced Scorecard strategy review meeting. Remember, this review meeting happens quarterly and is focused on strategic issues and not operational information. To set the table for this review, we need to quickly define several roles. In smaller organizations, some of these roles may be filled by the same individual. The first role is that of the executive team. This is the Executive Director or CEO and his or her direct reports. This group is typically 5-12 people who are responsible for executive the strategy, so they are the ones that make the strategic decisions. These are the active people in the meeting.

On January 15th we will be releasing the newest features of ClearPoint Strategy, the performance management software. We are calling this release Winter '10 (since it is 2010 and winter time). You can learn about the new features in detail at the ClearPoint website. I thought I would highlight a few of them in this post.

Ascendant Strategy Management Group is looking for a associate consultant in the Washington, DC area to support our rapidly growing public sector practice. As an associate consultant (entry-level) with Ascendant, you'll get a chance to participate actively on client engagements, help out with creating new products and services, and help us define and grow the company.

The Washington, DC school reform effort has been getting a lot of press recently. I think the teachers and administrators in Washington deserve a lot of credit for the advances they've made so far, but I think to really reform the district they have to start focusing more on strategy. My quick comment on a LinkedIn discussion turned out to be a little more lengthy, so I thought I'd share it here, too.

In my previous post, I discussed the easy part of building a scorecard and left us thinking about the hard part of managing with the scorecard. I tried to distinguish between the process of creating objectives and measures with doing something about having these objectives and measures. I believe strongly in the strategy review meeting. This isn't a once a year report, but it is a quarterly meeting where senior executives actually discuss strategy.

Pablo Eisenberg rightly points out the crisis facing charitable giving today in today's Wall Street Journal Report. He uses the better of a full page of print to outline his recommendations for how foundations and others can make a difference for nonprofits and their beneficiaries. While one can agree or disagree with the list – readers of this blog no doubt agree that to formalize strategy management, reporting and execution using a Balanced Scorecard would go a long way to addressing the challenges the author outlines.

Building a Balanced Scorecard is fun. We have been helping organizations determine what their strategy map, measures, and initiatives are for over 10 years. The process and the product are both enjoyable. Imagine spending time waxing on about your strategy and your objectives. Looking at your past performance and pondering the future opportunities. Your leadership team then gets together to debate the one-page view of your strategy, the strategy map, as Norton and Kaplan call it. This is fun stuff.