Robert S. Kaplan is Baker Foundation Professor at the Harvard Business School.

He joined the HBS faculty in 1984 after spending 16 years on the faculty of the business school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he served as Dean from 1977 to 1983. Kaplan received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T., and a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University. He has received honorary doctorates from the Universities of Stuttgart (1994), Lodz (2006), and Waterloo (2008). (http://drfd.hbs.edu). Robert was born in New York City in 1940. His father was a New York City public school principal and high school social studies teacher, and his mother was a homemaker and also worked as a high school secretary. Until the age of ten, he lived with his parents and two younger sisters in a one bedroom apartment in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium. He attended Bronx High School of Science and was designated a National Merit Scholar. Upon graduation in 1957 he entered Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he earned B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering. Following graduation from MIT, he worked for two years with Mitre Corporation and Planning Research

Corporation, both technical systems consulting firms. Seeking a more challenging career path, he enrolled in the operations research doctoral program at Cornell University. He took several courses at the Business School, which stimulated his interest in finance and

accounting. Completing his PhD in 1968, Kaplan joined the faculty of the Graduate School of Industrial Administration at Carnegie Mellon University. Encouraged by Yuji Ijiri, Bill Cooper, and other Carnegie colleagues, his teaching and research soon focused on financial and management accounting. Except for a one-year visiting professorship at the University Chicago, he remained at GSIA for fifteen years, serving as Dean of the school for six years. After a one year visiting appointment, he joined the Graduate School of Business

Administration at Harvard University in 1984. (http://fisher.osu.edu) Kaplans research, Executive Education teaching, and consulting focus on linking cost and performance management systems to strategy implementation. His current research focuses on two topics: measuring and managing organizational risk and, in a joint project with Michael Porter, measuring the cost of delivering health care and linking patient costs to outcomes. (http://drfd.hbs.edu) Robert was a co-creator, together with David P. Norton, of the balanced scorecard, a means of linking a company's current actions to its long-term goals. Kaplan and Norton introduced the balanced scorecard method in their 1992 Harvard Business Review article, The Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Performance.

This method has been endorsed by companies such as Mobil and Sears. The balanced scorecard envisages executives as pilots with a range of controls and indicators in front of them, based upon which they make decisions and develop strategies. There should be one of the most important management practices of an entire

generation. (http://en.wikipedia.org)

With a balanced scorecard to

manage the overall planning, management and control process is to balance between short-and long-term goals. The monetary and the non-monetary indicators should be measured. Often, the Balanced Scorecard is compared with the stakeholder approach and seen as an alternative to shareholder-value approach. Kaplan denies this: ". I'm all for a long-term maximization of shareholder value" Kaplan is the author or co-author of 12 His latest, written by Norton, is just published: "Alignment: Using the Balanced Scorecard to Create Corporate Synergies."(http://www.hossli.com)

He

has

also

published

in

the

fields

of strategy, cost

accounting and management accounting. Prior to Harvard, Kaplan was on the faculty and was Dean of the Tepper School of

Business at Carnegie Mellon University. (http://en.wikipedia.org) He has authored or co-authored 14 books and more than 150 papers including 23 in Harvard Business Review. Recent books include The

Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage, the fifth Balanced Scorecard book co-authored with
David Norton, and Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing with Steve Anderson. His previous books with Norton include Alignment,

Strategy Maps, named as one of the top ten business books of 2004
by Strategy

&

Business and

amazon.com, The

Strategy-Focused

Organization, named by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young as the best

international business book for year 2000, and The which

Balanced
has been

Scorecard:

Translating

Strategy

into

Action,

translated into 24 languages and won the 2001 Wildman Medal from the American Accounting Association for its impact on practice. He also co-authored Cost and Effect, Implementing Activity-Based Cost

Management, and Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, which received the American Accounting Association
Seminal Contributions to Literature work has Award won in 2007. and

(http://drfd.hbs.edu)

Kaplans

national

international acclaim from both academic and professional groups. His papers twice received the Notable Contribution to the Accounting Literature Association Award and given the jointly by the American Institute Accounting of CPAs.

American

(http://fisher.osu.edu)

A skilled lecturer and case teacher, his over 50 published instructional cases and many video-taped lectures introduced thousands of students around the world to his innovative thinking about activity-based costing and the Balanced Scorecard. In 1988, he received the American Accounting Associations Outstanding Educator Award. His professional service includes membership on the Financial Accounting Standards Advisory Committee, the Reagan-Bush Task Force on Social Security, the Manufacturing Studies Board of the National Research Council, and major committees of the American Accounting Association, the Institute of Management Accounting (IMA), AACSB International, Computer-Aided Manufacturing-

International (CAM-I), and the American Statistical Association. In recognition of his service contributions, he received the IMAs Distinguished Service Award, the Lifetime Contribution Award of the American Accounting Associations Management Accounting Section, and the Outstanding Contributions Award of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK).(http://fisher.osu.edu)

Roberst S. Kaplans book, The Execution Premium, describes a systematic and proven framework for achieving the financial results promised by your strategy,how to link strategy to operations, continually guide strategy execution and updating the strategy in

light of changing circumstances. It introduces the new Office of Strategic Management for facilitating successful Owing to strategy execution

implementation.(http://www.leighbureau.com)

failures, companies realize just a fraction of the financial performance promised in their strategic plans. It doesn't have to be that way, maintain Robert Kaplan and David Norton in The Execution Premium. Building on their breakthrough works on strategy-focused organizations, the authors describe a multistage system that enables you to gain measurable benefits from your carefully formulated business strategy. (http://drfd.hbs.edu)