BSC Designer – Balanced Scorecard Software

In studying organizational development and life cycle of businesses, it appears that there are four phases of organizational growth and therefore a need for four kinds of managers. The classification that will follow is not universal nor does it claim to be exclusive or for that matter all encompassing, but it is useful to us from the standpoint of measuring four different goals that are faced by the organizational managers.

No matter the business size or industry, the primary goal for a manager is to continue developing and growing self and others. However, that looks different in different businesses and businesses of different sizes. Thus we will in turn look at micro business, single manager business, multi-manager business and multiple business unit business.

In micro business, where the owner of the business is likely manager of self and at most a few people who simply act as extensions of the owner. In a larger business this is similar to complexity of work of a front-line supervisor (albeit the dynamics are fairly different).  The primary goal of the manager in this environment is to continue growing the technical expertise and become the expert in the specific subject. Employees of this type of a business appreciate the expertise that is possessed by their manager and largely respect the manager with regard to that expertise. The best method that I can think of for measuring continued growth in that expertise is tracking of the notes by said manager that this manager makes when he discovers something new, some new approach or detail, in the workplace. The very effort to keep notes is something that most managers lack, and is a best practice that needs to be encouraged and is encouraged through this measurement process.

Perhaps more importantly, these notes should be discussed at least occasionally with someone who is the mentor or advisor of this manager. Good notes should be encouraged as in the age of information these notes may be the most valuable product that the manager produces.

Performing this routine of taking a few minutes out of the day to write down key thoughts and observations, as well as discussing them with a mentor, will accomplish a few things: it will act as an indicator of consistency, continued learning, awareness and growth. While quantity of notes could be faked, quality of them will be apparent to anyone who decides to audit the trail. Perhaps, most importantly, these notes become knowledge-base for the organization as it grows.

This kind of measurement can be implemented universally throughout larger organizations for every employee, thus insuring everyone’s progress. A basic scale can be used for watching the staff: 0 notes per day means that a person is disengaged, 1 note per day may mean that a person is probably not being challenged enough, 2-4 notes per day means that a person is probably growing at a reasonable pace or at least faking it, 5+ notes per day means that a person is likely in over their head.  With audits and mentor reviews, this practice would be very hard to fake, thus the quality of metrics should be credible.

Yet, in a larger organization, this would be a largely insufficient metric. If we are talking about a manager who is a department head, or manager of a small business, where there is only one manager (approximately six to sixty employees) it is not enough to maintain personal development. A more prominent measure is the ability and willingness to delegate well. A manager is only as productive as their employees. Ideally, a manager has their team so fully trained that they can go off and do something else, or go on vacation without any problems. This ability to delegate can be measured by assessing the tasks which the manager is the only one trained and authorized to do. Greater the number of these tasks, the less likelihood that the manager is capable of exploring new opportunities, working on the business, focusing on the growth.

It is always a concern when a manger cannot go on a vacation. Some of the stronger organizations can easily have the entire leadership team spend a week or two working on things that are strategic, rather than day to day. Obviously, someone could argue that this means they are overstaffed, but if their other indicators, such as financials, do not reflect over-staffing, the only explanation is that everyone is cross-trained to cover for each other and the processes are so simplified that the company can devote the bulk of their time on the new initiatives.

The company does not have to focus on the new initiatives, that is entirely dependant on the organizational purpose which will be discussed at a much later date, but every organization needs the capacity to do so, if necessary. The point is only that a manager can do so, if there is desire to do so, or if the need arises.

This measurement, is but a loose approximation to the proportion of time spent working in the business vs. working on it, but unlike that measure it is not nearly as subjective and qualitative. It also forces the manager to identify their tasks and think about their succession, thus creating a great feedback loop to gauge their progress.

Eventually, there is a chance that the organization will grow beyond one manager, especially if the main manager is getting good at delegating. This is where the third measurement becomes important (though, it may well be a good idea to continue with the other two as well). Unlike the two previous ones, this one is a team measurement, it is a measure of communication and cohesiveness withing the team. The actual measure also forces to record something very crucial that most organisations do not record: the decision making process. The measurement is the percentage of non-routine decisions (decisions that are more than just repeat of previous decisions) is done with an opportunity to comment, with real discussion, dissent and consensus. As a secondary measure of the maturity of the organization, the # of non-routine decisions per day can also be monitored (and is by definition monitored in order to arrive at the other variable).

Organizations that take the time to build consensus and document why they decided what they decided are much more likely to reach conclusions that everyone can live with, as well as build up a database of precedents that would allow for rapid decision-making. However, this is a slow, painful process, that only the strongest teams can endure on the daily basis, thus organizations tend to either never get to it, by leaving one key decision maker in charge, or abandon it as the teams get large, or to keep the management teams small.

Meanwhile, the optimal solution, once the collaboration model starts bogging down, is to create multiple teams, that focus on multiple product-lines or multiple markets. Spinning off sister companies, and creating a network of related businesses is by far stronger than trying to manage an unwieldy large team. It is precisely this ability to create spin offs that is most valuable at this level. The number, and the quality of these spin offs under management is a very strong indicator of the management’s ability at the investor level. At this point in the career of a manager, track record indeed speaks for itself. In order to improve their metrics, this investor level manager needs to invest their time and money in to developing the most promising people and businesses, which is precisely what we would want this manager to do.

Obviously, these measurement methods are much more suited to privately held, or actively managed businesses and co-ops. They do apply to publically traded corporations, but the last layer, has to be measured based on the performance of the actual spin offs the manager started, otherwise it is likely that appointment to a position, not ability will decide the manager’s indicated performance.

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Oleg Tumarkin, Juris Doctor, Master of Business Administration, Certified Six Sigma Black Belt, Practitioner of Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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What can be done so that the Balanced Scorecard becomes the main organizational feedback system and it measures the things that allow the company to safely take off, land, fly and navigate through its difficulties and opportunities, regardless of the outside weather conditions?

I am reminded of a story from the beginning of the 20th century where the reality of the plane use has changed with faster engines, higher altitudes and a conversion to the closed rather than open pilot’s seat, but the pilots continued to do the same thing they have been used to doing – relying on the topography to orient themselves. In fact, if they were not sure where they were, they would swoop down to look at the names of the train stations and thus orient themselves. In order to break them off this habit and to get them to rely on their controls, in exasperation the commanding officers literally commanded the soldiers to travel to the various train stations and change up the signage if they heard an airplane approaching. The exercise worked.  The pilots finally got the message, they cannot rely on the signs on the ground to navigate, they have to rely on the controls in the airplane. This mental shift has done more for the development of the aviation than much of the technological change that came before and after that shift.

This has become so fundamental to flying that before a pilot can get a license to fly bigger planes, they have to pass a controls exam and have a number of controls only flight miles. Sometimes the pilots still make mistakes, either because they do not trust their controls or the controls malfunction. Quite a few deadly crashes are attributed to either of these problems. However, we continue to fly relying on controls and work on improving the controls and making them more redundant and this propels aviation forward.

Business world has not made and is not really ready to make a similar leap. No matter how much the speed of business has increased, no matter how much higher our businesses can fly, no matter how closed off the cockpits of our business are from the outside we still orient ourselves by getting down to the land, slowing down, looking out of the window and trying to read the signs. Needless to say, this is no way to move forward.

Historically, the main organizational feedback mechanism has been the income statement (or it’s predictive cousin, the budget). However, this does not work in the long term for a rapidly changing business, since the easiest way to meet the budget is to sacrifice the future in order to do so. It used to work. It worked OK in the environment that is largely static, where not much changes, even such a limited feedback tool was enough. But as competition gets aggressive, as speeds and flexibility increase, we are forced to look at a much broader picture and we fail to do so with the traditional financial only indicators.

In 1992 Norton and Kaplan, in presenting the Balanced Scorecard, formalized the thought that we need to look at multiple voices that came from Total Quality Management model which in turn was influenced from Toyoda, who no doubt was indirectly influenced by Andrew Carnegie’s Wealth of Nations. Yet, 18 years later the adoption of this tool has been sporadic and rarely company-wide.

And the only solution to this, in my mind, is a more streamlined, system that can be implemented much more readily that the traditional Balanced Scorecard. A system in which management is trained and certified. A system that is testable and verifiable, repeatable and replicate-able. A universal system of Business measurement that can be implemented in any kind of a business and used by anyone to provide consistently better feedback than is available by use of the financial statements alone, or relying primarily on intuition.

Just as the airplane can only be flown by a simultaneous attention to gauges that use different systems of measurement (fuel gauge, altimeter, attitude indicator, air speed indicator, magnetic compass, heading indicator, turn indicator, vertical speed indicator, course deviation indicator, radio magnetic indicator) that are fairly standard no matter the airplane, the need for business indicators that provides information in a similar fashion is even more crucial since unlike flying we cannot do without it.

This tool is the Excellence  Matrix (E-M8) which is being developed right now by Futureworks in collaboration  with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs. The challenges are many, since in business we do not even have the terminology or universally agreed upon units of measurement that define the variable that we must monitor, but a 100 years ago the airplanes faced the same challenge and they overcame it. Thus, we need to commit to doing the same in the realm of business.

Would you like to be a part of this research or one of the companies that becomes a test bed for these new tools? If so, get in touch with the good folks at Aks-labs or with myself directly and we will figure out what are the opportunities for collaboration.

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Oleg Tumarkin, Juris Doctor, Master of Business Administration, Certified Six Sigma Black Belt is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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Employee morale is second only to the quality of the management team in influencing the long term success of a business or for that matter of any organization. It (the employee morale) is a very good indicator of the quality of the management team since it is the most direct outcome of good management. After all  a good management team will do everything to engage their employees.

The best way to measure employee morale is not however the traditional survey. After all, this is not just costly and very periodic information, but it is typically very biased and unrepresentative. People are generally not very aware of how they feel and are unlikely to express their feelings in a place where management whom they might not trust will see it. They are even less likely to produce meaningful responses if they are faced with  a multiple choice or likert scale to describe their morale. Even if the data was perfect, the management would have limited ability to analyze it and  act upon it, since they would have no way of separating the aspects of how people feel that are due to things happening within the organization from the feelings that are just their frustrations or joys bleeding over from other aspects of their life.

Neither is absenteeism, or tardiness necessarily a good indicator of employee morale,  because appropriate external threats and rewards can cause people to show up on time and be there every day even if they dread their jobs.  They would be miserable there and have very low productivity.

This leaves us with engagement. After all if employees love their job they will care and be engaged. And even if it were possible for them to love their job but be disengaged and not care, this would be of little value to the business.

Thus engagement is what we really want to measure.  But how do we measure it? The best approach that I have found is based on the assumption that people who care will tend to want to improve the facilities around them and that if they are allowed to do so, they will like where they work and care about it even more. By picking this variable we can insure that the very process of measurement will propel the organization in the right direction. (Unlike a survey, since someone might not even realize that they are unhappy until they have to say that they are on a monthly survey)

So, the KPI of employee engagement is the number of employee recommended changes that have actually been implemented per full time employee equivalent.

This indicator should closely correlate with the quality of the management team, since the changes can only get implemented and employees can only be happy when there are open channels of communication between them and the management. Study after study  have shown that good employee morale has a positive impact on the bottom line and I suspect that this is a large part of the reason why.

While employee engagement is a lagging indicator for management ability, it is a leading indicator for process improvement, customer loyalty and financial performance.

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Oleg Tumarkin, JD, MBA, CSSBB is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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According to Douglas Hubbard, the foremost expert in the field of business decision support,  “In a portfolio, the investment with the highest return on investment is investment in the information necessary to allocate the investment of the rest of the portfolio.” He argues that up to 5% of any portfolio can be spent on gathering the information necessary to invest the rest of the resources wisely.

This same principle applies to organizational management. A consistent commitment to investing in measurement and feedback systems within the organizations is paramount to good decision making.

But not all investment in data gathering is created equal. Information value inversion is at work. The things that we measure often and fairly precisely, typically have little impact on any crucial decisions. The things we know little about can often net a significant improvement in the decision making by us learning even a little bit more about that information.

Thus, a good Balanced Scorecard can act both as a useful tool and as a waste of money, and unfortunately is often the latter for many organizations.
There are two reasons for it:

1. The Balanced Scorecard is often an after the fact bolt on, it is not part of the core organizational thinking. This is by far the most important problem, since if it is not the key feedback loop but rather one of them, it often serves to create noise rather than reduce it.
2. We tend to measure things that we know how to measure, and more likely than not those are not the right things to measure. There is no scientific approach to determining which things are really worth measuring, we take our best guesses, and typically we are spectacularly wrong. We treat it as an art, yet expect predictably consistently good results, as though it was a science.

What can be done to solve these challenges? Indeed, are they worth solving?
I will start with the second question first. Fundamentally, if you do not solve them with this tool, or some other dashboard, broad multi-variable feedback tool, you are flying blind. While it is dangerous, it does not stand out, since everyone else is too. During the early days of flight, pilots did not have good controls and would often fly along the railroad lines, so that they could rely on the visible landscape and rail station names to navigate. This had lots of problems, but so long as everyone was flying slowly enough, low enough and in familiar enough terrain it worked. However, the circumstances changed, planes fly faster, higher, in more varied weather and can no longer orient themselves in the same way. They have to use gauges on their dashboard and should be able to take off and land without even looking out of the window. This has forever changed the aviation.
In business, until fairly recently we could afford to fly low enough, slow enough and in familiar enough landscape to avoid the need to have useful dashboards. But, not only does this doom your company to continuing to do what you have always done, it may very swiftly obsolete you as others figure out how to do this right. So, ideally, you want to implement the dashboards well because you are aiming for the stars, but if not, implement them well because you don’t want to be left behind.

What about the second question. What can be done so that the Balanced Scorecard becomes the main organizational feedback system and it measures the things that allow the company to safely take off, land, fly and navigate through its difficulties and opportunities, regardless of the outside weather conditions? That sounds like a great topic for the article that will be forthcoming in a week.

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Oleg Tumarkin, JD, MBA, CSSBB is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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Over the last few weeks I have been running an interesting experiment in one of my classes. I gave each student $5 and told them to go turn it in to more. The project is evaluated on these variables:

Each variable is given a range of 1-5 with the extremes being defined

1) Internal team dynamics;
1. Don’t want to do business with this team ever again
5. Will name my kids after my business partners

2) Engage others in helping out with execution;
1. Did it all ourselves
5. An international movement came together to make it happen

3) Utilization of public and community resources (space/tools/software);
1. Just used what we had
5. Multiple community resource holders begged us to come again

4) Effectiveness of execution and repeatability;
1. We have no idea by what miracle it happened
5. We can do it consistently and have trained others to do it

5) Were the customers open to doing more business?
1. Everyone told their friends to run the other way
5. Lots of referrals and invitations to do more business

6) Was it profitable enough for the team to want to keep doing it?
1. Not even if this was the only way I could make money
5. Michael Dell, Bill Gates and the rest of college dropouts got nothing on me

7) Was everything done to minimize risks?
1. I am just glad we are not dead or in jail right now
5. Stakeholders, community and environment could possibly be harmed by this project

Does any of this matter in a really long run?

1. In the long run, we are all dead. – John M. Keynes
5. The impact of this project will matter even after this Universe is no more.

This has been a great success with students quickly exploring many real business ideas and one of them managing to get $80 return on the money, while most made between $7 and $30.  More importantly, they learned a lot about starting a business, mainly that it’s not a pretty theory, but rather a matter of doing something others will pay for. For the next round I have tightened up the requirements and suspect they will do even better.

These eight basic metrics could just as easily be applied to any team, working on any business. These metrics may be hard to ascertain for some businesses, and are way to subjective in other situations, yet these metrics may well be a much better guide to starting a business than many of the more highly specialized metrics that seem to abound.

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Oleg Tumarkin, JD, MBA, CSSBB is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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Success rates for startup businesses are staggeringly low. Yet, everyday thousands of people around the world make the decision to engage in business or start a non-profit and believe that they will defy the odds. After all, one of the most effective ways to change our world, create value and be well-compensated is through engaging in business. An organization gives us leverage to do many things that we cannot do by ourselves.

Individuals who run successful businesses gain power to shape their own destiny. Though operating an organization can be challenging and perilous, it is often a powerful way to fulfill our God-given purpose. An organization must address both future growth and exit strategies. There are times when our purpose will advise us to dissolve the business. Though just as likely, we may get ready to move on to yet bigger and better ways of creating value.

Entrepreneurial management gives us the tools to unleash our potential. It is the discipline of consistently covering all the bases, while focusing on the important. Management is stewardship of resources on behalf of owners to the greatest benefit of everyone. Management principles can help us be effective in everything we do. But what if we need to start something new? Traditionally, this was left to the few entrepreneurial types, who, we were told, are very different from the rest of us in their innate abilities. Yet, at the current rate of technological change, it may no longer be an option to rely solely on these natural born entrepreneurs. Today, to be effective stewards, we must innovate and initiate in business and in life.

Flexibility and speed of change are forcing more and more of us to start and manage various aspects of our lives, rather than rely on someone else to do it for us. It is no longer acceptable to leave the entrepreneurial tasks to others. We must learn the skills that will help us succeed. While management is something that is traditionally taught in colleges around the world, it has proven to be a hard discipline to truly master. The fact that traditional educational system has failed to produce consistently successful managers does not negate the need for learning the discipline. Rather, it points to the need of hands-on learning that is typical of other hands-on trades.

It is possible to learn and apply management principles in order to improve business performance. At some level it is for everyone, since all of us need to manage time, money, resources and relationships. There are a few people that naturally gravitate toward making decisions and being responsible. Nevertheless, many of us need basic understanding of business subjects should we ever need to navigate the waters of business and find business partners with skills to succeed.  Studying all aspects of entrepreneurial management will help spare the headaches of learning by trial and error and allow the advance to more complicated challenges quickly.

The foundation of any business is a team of entrepreneurial managers who are willing to try new things and have a long-term vested interest in the prosperity of an organization. Ownership and management are fused in many startups, but they do not need to be. It is often practical to have people with management skills manage a business that they do not own. Much wealth in the world is managed by managers who have no or limited ownership. Owner’s interests are the same as investor’s interests, and that is generating a return on investment. Management, however, chooses how to go about generating the return.

Management team, not the owner, arranges resources for the greatest common good. Management team attracts resources and controls them day to day, while owners exercise limited control. While interests of the business typically represent interests of its owners, a manager is held to a higher standard. Beyond responsibility to the investors, management team has responsibilities to the community, customers, workers and business partners, just to name a few.

In a lot of startups there is no clear distinction between managers and workers. The problem is that when the organization gets busy doing, it has no longer any time to be thinking. Even in the startup environment it is practical to set particular time aside for specifically managerial functions – planning and making sure plans are being followed. Some organizations even rely on outside consultants to meet with the team just to keep things on track.

Management is as much about working with others as about anything else. To be successful, a manager needs to function as part of a team. Managers must gel together and work as one unit. Working as a team offers the opportunity to make business fun. It is enjoyable to add value, especially when it is done in the fellowship of your peers.

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Oleg Tumarkin, JD, MBA, CSSBB is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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So, what are the strengths of this framework and where do we need to yet improve it? I have already alluded to a need for more than four dimensions. In fact, I propose eight. To make them easier to remember I named them all by starting with a letter M. These dimensions are: Management, the foundation of business and deserving of individual attention apart from the rest of people management, since if we are unable to manage ourselves effectively, how can we manage the business. Manpower, the people who make up the organization. Means, the business tools, resources, facilities, in accounting terms fixed assets of the business. Method, the process of coordinating Means and Manpower to serve the next M- Market. Market, is the customer and the judge of the firms performance, it is also the product that was developed and delivered with the right Method to support the Customer desires. Money is our sixth M, it is the traditional accounting/financial focus of the business, managing the cash flows, monitoring the financial accountability. While unfortunately the traditional Balanced Scorecard stops there, I propose we keep going to things that are more important than money and to insure which we actually do earn the money.  Mitigation of Risk is one such area, since no money in the world will do you any good if you are terminally ill, dead or in jail, if you blow up our lowly planet or kill all that is dear to you. Mitigation of Risk is an area that most resembles voodoo witch doctor approaches in that it is a new discipline that has not had a chance to fully form, but the fact that is so amorphous and imprecise nevertheless does not mean that we can disregard it in the decision making. But we must not stop there, unless that is your only goal is to survive. The final broad category is all inclusive, it is the Mission of the organization, it focuses on the very purpose of the organizational existence and begs the question: Why does we exist? It is only few and very blessed organizations that are in the position to wrestle with this tough question because it takes a degree of success and competence in the other seven focus areas before the managers can face the ultimate question of human existence and in a sense become philosophers, lovers of wisdom. But as Plato argues in his Republic no country is as blessed as one that is governed by the philosopher king. And I might add that the same holds for an organization that has reached the levels of success that allow such a reign.

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Oleg Tumarkin, JD, MBA, CSSBB is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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A while ago, Doug Hubbard has introduced me to the concept of measurement inversion. According to him the more something matters the less we tend to measure it and the less we know about it. Things that really matter are often highly imprecise and thus there is a great opportunity to learn a whole lot more. Whereas, the things that do not really matter can often be easily measurement and as a result have been studied to death.

For example, CEO’s actions can impact the company much more than those of an entry level employee, but there is a lot more effort in tracking that employee’s time than the CEO’s. Businesses tend to focus on tracking and managing costs, while the better predictability of revenue is by far more important.

This applies to just about anything. The topics that really matter, like love, relationships, community, friendship, motivation, ability to learn, caring, customer loyalty and leadership are inherently hard to quantify and can be damaged by the measurement process itself. However, we would gain a lot more insight by spending the time to try to have a better idea of the degrees within each of these variables, rather than trying to insure that the attendance is perfect, number of orders is processed in a particular amount of time, or scrap rate has reached a certain part per million count.

Thus, a large part of an organizational challenge is to stop measuring all the wrong things, either things that do not really matter, or things that do not tend to vary much, or things that can be measured less frequently, or to a lower level of precision and still not affect how we make decisions.

Measurement has to become divorced from precise numbers, after all most things are not very precise at all. Nor do we need the level of perfect precision, or for that matter can afford it.

Introduction of tools such as Monte Carlo simulation and SPC charting in the calculation of the variables that are used as KPI in the business setting is the ticket to having more meaningful data that facilitates better decisions.

Among those KPIs one that is worth at least occasionally considering is the benefit from improvement in decision making as a result of availability of the measurement data for each variable at a level of granularity and accuracy that is  currently available. This may help us fight the measurement inversion.

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Oleg Tumarkin, JD, MBA, CSSBB is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Lakeland College and Concordia University of Wisconsin. His firm, FutureWorks, in partnership with Bucket Brigade and AKS-Labs provides business coaching and Balanced Scorecard implementations.  His life’s passion is the development of a universal business measurement and management system that would cause management in to the realm of a repeatable, replicable, yet humane and flexible science.

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