The sustainability balanced scorecard

Abstract

Kaplan and Norton’s Balanced Scorecard is a management tool that supports the successful implementation of corporate strategies. It has been discussed and considered widely both in practice and research. By linking operational and non-financial corporate activities with causal chains to the firm’s long-term strategy the Balanced Scorecard supports the alignment and management of all corporate activities according to their strategic relevance. The Balanced Scorecard makes it possible to take into account non-monetary strategic success factors which significantly impact the economic success of a business. It is thus a promising starting-point to also incorporate environmental and social aspects into the main management system of a firm. This paper proposes for value-oriented corporate sustainability management with the Sustainability Balanced Scorecard. This helps to overcome the shortcomings of conventional approaches to environmental and social management systems by integrating the three pillars of sustainability into a single and overarching management tool. A Sustainability Balanced Scorecard shows the causal relation between the economic, environmental, and social performance of firms. On the one side this paper discusses the different possible forms of a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard from a conceptual point of view. On the other side it shows the process and steps of formulating a Sustainability Balanced Scorecard for a fictitious company in practice based on the experience of a major joint research project in Germany and Switzerland. 1 Corresponding author: Marcus Wagner, e-mail: mwagner@uni-lueneburg.de. The Sustainability Balanced Scorecard – Theory and Application of a Tool for Value-Based Sustainability Management