Breakthrough Soup

Recently, I’ve seen several posts that referenced the Balanced Scorecard. I had not seen a mention of this methodology/tool in some time. It reminded me of an article I wrote with my brother, Dr. Gerald DeBusk, back in 2011 about using the Balanced Scorecard and Hoshin planning in Lean Six Sigma organizations. It seemed worth referencing, and with permission from Harvard Business Publishing, the summary is reprinted below, and the entire article is available on the Resources Page.

Combining Hoshin Planning with the Balanced Scorecard to Achieve

Breakthrough Results

By Gerald K. DeBusk and Chuck DeBusk

Many organizations today are adopting the Lean and Lean SixSigma tools and philosophies. Studies conducted by the authors have revealed that four of every 10 organizations are using Lean or Lean Six Sigma. (Hereafter we will use the designation LSS to refer to both Lean and Lean Six Sigma.) Earlier research we performed on LSS raised our curiosity as to what complementary effects, if any, exist for organizations that adopt both LSS and strategy or policy deployment tools such as the Balanced Scorecard

(BSC) and Hoshin Planning, which originated in Japan. If suchstrategy deployment tools were being used in LSS organizations, would their use have an effect on LSS benefits? We surveyed more than 200 members of the Execution Premium Community (XPC), asking them about their use of LSS and of the BSC and Hoshin Planning. The results reveal that the combination of the BSC and Hoshin Planning can be especially helpful for those organizations pursuing LSS.