Balanced Scorecard Collaborative Honors Siemens IC Mobile, Skandia, and Borealis With Prestigious Hall of Fame Award.

Business Editors

NICE, France & LINCOLN, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2001

Exemplary Results of These Strategy-Focused Organizations Lauded

at European Summit

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc. today announced it has named Siemens Information and Communication Mobile (IC Mobile), Skandia, and Borealis to the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for achieving dramatic success by becoming Strategy-Focused Organizations. The awards were presented today to senior executives of each corporation at the Balanced Scorecard European Summit being held this week in Nice, France.

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative president Dr. David Norton said, "We created the Hall of Fame to publicly acknowledge the hard work and remarkable results of implementing the Balanced Scorecard to create the Strategy-Focused Organization. The Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame pays tribute to the success that each organization has attained."

Selection Criteria

Hall of Fame winners celebrated today met the award criteria with breakthrough performance largely as a result of applying one or more of the five principles of a Strategy-Focused Organization. The five principles are: mobilize change through executive leadership; translate the strategy to operational terms; align the organization to the strategy; make strategy everyone's job; and make strategy a continual process. Other selection criteria were: implement the Balanced Scorecard as defined by the Kaplan/Norton methodology; present the case at a public conference; achieve media recognition for the scorecard implementation; produce significant financial or market share gains; and demonstrate measurable achievement of customer objectives. Today's honorees were personally selected by Balanced Scorecard creators Dr. Robert Kaplan and Dr. David Norton from nominations made by experts at Balanced Scorecard Collaborative.

"We've always had strategies, but through Balanced Scorecards we bring them to life," said Rudi Lamprecht, member of the managing board at Siemens AG and president of Siemens IC Mobile. "Every business unit has a scorecard and uses it to focus attention on designated critical success factors. Moreover, each employee knows his or her contribution to the strategy, enforcing alignment and accountability throughout the organization. It's the way we manage our business. We are honored to receive the Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame award."

According to Henrik Danckwardt, senior vice president and COO (knowledge management) at Skandia, "We have achieved a great deal through use of the Skandia Navigator, our version of the Balanced Scorecard. Marrying our IT system to the Navigator produced the perfect tool for strategic business management on all levels of the organization. Navigator guides Skandia on the corporate level, subsidiary level, and the individual contributor level. By enabling everyone in the organization to see the overall picture and realize they can have an influence, the Navigator is helping to make Skandia a great company. We are very honored by the announcement from Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, and it gives us tremendous support in our continued implementation of the concept on all levels in Skandia."

"Our success with the Balanced Scorecard is mainly due to its focus and simplicity," said Dr. Franz Wurm, executive vice president and CFO of Borealis, one of the world's leading suppliers of environmentally superior polyolefin plastics. "Each employee understands the `reds' and `greens' of the scorecard, and those concepts cascade based upon strategic direction, derived operational targets, and action plans. Our approach is about more than defining relevant measures--it includes communication and keeping the Balanced Scorecard simple and focused on continual improvement. We are most pleased that Borealis has been chosen to receive this honor."

Hall of Fame Honorees

Hall of Fame winners each achieved success meaningful for the organization's particular industry, relative to specific, individual business objectives.

Siemens IC Mobile offers the complete range of mobile solutions including mobile devices infrastructure and applications. It is a fast-growing business in a fiercely competitive, burgeoning wireless industry faced with the need for rapid product innovation and operational excellence. Senior management at this 29,000 person business unit of Siemens AG wanted to strongly link its strategic direction to every day operations, and selected the Balanced Scorecard as a robust framework for managing within an environment of constant change. By linking its scorecard to the Six Sigma program, Siemens aligned its strategy from the boardroom to the shop floor in little more than a year, ensuring that the entire organization was aligned to the strategy and that executing it became everyone's job. The results were impressive. Sales increased 76% to EUR 9 billion and earnings jumped 127% to EUR 692 million in fiscal year 1999/2000.

With almost SEK one trillion in assets under management, financial services giant Skandia is both the oldest company on the Stockholm Stock Exchange and one that boasts a good long-term performance. The Skandia Navigator, introduced in the early 1990s, became mandatory by 1999 and has replaced traditional budget reporting. Skandia was a pioneer in valuing and disclosing intangible assets such as intellectual capital. Recognizing that essentially non-financial indicators drive financial performance, the Navigator has helped Skandia translate strategy into operational terms and make it a continual process. The results are impressive: for the year 2000, sales were up 48% to SEK 198 billion, operating profit was up 22% to SEK 5.8 billion, and share price rose 19% in 2000.

Borealis, headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark, was created from the 1994 merger of petrochemical activities of Statoil (Norway) and Neste (Finland). In 1998 Borealis acquired and successfully integrated the petrochemical business of OMV (Austria). The EUR 4 billion, 5,200-employee firm is a leader in the global petrochemicals industry. The challenge of merging disparate corporate cultures with more than a dozen nationalities was met head on by mobilizing change through executive leadership. Financial management and performance measurement were improved, operations streamlined, authority decentralized, and traditional budgeting eliminated. Borealis implemented the Balanced Scorecard and cascaded it throughout the organization to structure new strategic performance objectives, along with other objectives around customers, processes, and people. In the six years since the merger, Borealis averaged an after tax 10% return on capital employed and significantly increased its market value.

The Award

A stunning Steuben crystal rising star, designed by Robert Cassetti, was presented to senior executives from each winning company at the Balanced Scorecard European Summit: "Performance Strategies for the New Economy." The Summit is jointly organized by Balanced Scorecard Collaborative and Business Intelligence. For information on the Summit, visit www.scorecardsummit.com

Today's winners in the inaugural European award ceremony join other Hall of Fame companies including: ABB Switzerland, Brown & Root/Halliburton, Hilton Hotels, AT&T Canada, and UPS.

About Balanced Scorecard Collaborative

Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, Inc. (BSCol) is a new kind of professional services firm that facilitates the worldwide awareness, use, enhancement, and integrity of the Balanced Scorecard as a value-added management process. Founded and led by the creators of the Balanced Scorecard concept, Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton, BSCol provides Strategy-Focused Organization and Balanced Scorecard excellence through consulting, conferences, training, publishing, action working groups, certification, and online services. For more information, please call us at 781.259.3737, or visit us on the web where you can join Balanced Scorecard Online(TM) for the latest insight and resources at www.bscol.com

About the Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard (BSC) is a framework for creating Strategy-Focused Organizations. The BSC helps to describe, implement, and manage strategy at all levels of an enterprise by linking objectives, initiatives, and measures to an organization's strategy. The scorecard provides an enterprise view of an organization's overall performance by integrating financial measures with other key performance indicators around customer perspectives, internal business processes, and organizational growth, learning, and innovation.

Since the concept was introduced by Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton in 1992, BSCs have been implemented at corporate, business unit, shared services, team, and individual levels at hundreds of private and public sector organizations worldwide. The BSC has been the subject of four articles in Harvard Business Review, more than 200 articles in business publications, two best-selling business books (now in 18 languages), numerous Harvard Business School case studies, and public conferences around the world.

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