Many non-profit organizations, associations, and government agencies use the Balanced Scorecard as a way to overcome the strains and varying pulls of their combined energies. But have you ever considered that the Balanced Scorecard can help you outside of work as well?

Leadership at a non-profit or government agency is not always about high-level thinking and flying-by-wire; sometimes you need to get up close and personal with a pesky problem or uncooperative trends and measures. Leaders especially need to know how to identify the root cause of a problem. Go beyond the symptoms and surface appearances and find the deeper reasons for the problem – this is what we mean by "root cause analysis."

Rochester City School District is in the process of reinventing itself, and perhaps, reinventing the way that educational leaders across the country think about K12 educational performance. Rochester is on its way to improving its graduation rate, growing it from an abysmal 39% to an acceptable 75%, but Rochester's ambitions do not stop there.