Good Morning! It’s a pleasure to meet all of you at the beach! On behalf of Spider Strategies and the Balanced Scorecard Institute, I’d like to welcome you to the 2014 Users Conference—our first conference dedicated to users of the Nine Steps to Success framework and QuickScore performance reporting software.I hope you get a chance to visit some other parts of Myrtle Beach—it’s a great place to vacation.
We have partnered with others to make this conference possible and also to share information from complimentary experts—George Washington University, Schelling Point, Stacey Barr and the Association for Strategic Planning. We are finalizing a new partnership with Potentia, a provider of Lean and Six Sigma simulation courses and expertise. These partners that allow us to offer expanded and richer training and other services to a worldwide audience.The George Washington University College of Professional Studies jointly certifies our professional and master professional practitioner certifications. Jim Robinson is here representing the College and will be giving us a presentation on leadership tomorrow. Michael Taylor and SchellingPoint is our newest partner. SchellingPoint has a fantastic tool to help organizations become more aligned around difficult issues and decisions. Michael is also speaking on this subject later today. We will start offering alignment optimization consulting and training within a few months.For those of you who know performance measurement, the name Stacey Barr conjures up an immediate impression of deep knowledge on how to get to the performance measures that matter most to an organization. The Institute is the exclusive trainer for Stacey’s PumP Performance Workshop framework. Courses are available now, taught by the Institute’s COO and performance measurement guru, David Wilsey. David is a PuMP certified trainer and will lead one of our workshops on the third day of the conference. We partner with the Association for Strategic Planning to help individuals get certified in the strategic planning and management disciplines. ASP is the only worldwide certifying body for this profession and we have developed a separate training program to prepare individuals for their certification exam.And finally, Scott Henschel is here from Potentia. Scott is giving a presentation on strategy execution and process improvement tomorrow afternoon and a simulation workshop on day 3. We will start sponsoring his simulation workshop in a few months.
I’d like to extend a special welcome to our international attendees. As you can see from the map our conference includes a mix of cultures and countries. Australia South Africa Uganda Ghana Saudi Arabia Qatar Switzerland United Kingdom Saint Lucia Costa Rica Belize Canada and the United StatesPlease let us know if there is anything we can do to make your stay more comfortable. It is exiting to see such a diversity of attendees.
At the dinner tonight we will announce the winners of the Institute’s 2014 Award for Excellence. We have two new winners this year and we are very proud of what they have accomplished with their balanced scorecard systems.We also have two past award winners with us today:John Rudrud of the National Marrow Donor Program and two representatives from Army Medicine, one from the Medical Department Center & School, our Award winner, and the other from the Medical Research & Material Command-- ScotHencshel and Rusty Kreitz.All of them are either presenting or serving on a panel. Please search them out over the next few days also, as I’m sure they would be happy to tell you about their successes as well as their challenges.
In addition to a mix of cultures, we have a mix of sectors, roughly split about ½ from business and industry and ½ from mission-driven organizations—education, nonprofit, and government.This mix mirrors our delegate mix experience at our workshops held in major cities worldwide—the balanced scorecard management system is equally applicable to the private sector and the mission-driven sector. There is a lot to learn from each other, and I’m sure we’ll see that cross-sector learning taking place here over the next few days.
Our planned events include an Award dinner tonight and a early evening reception tomorrow nightWe’ll have a daily drawing for a few cool prizes each day, so be sure you submit your evaluation forms at the end of each day to be eligible for a drawing prize.
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Our conference theme is Strategy Execution with the balanced scorecard and QuickScore. Before we go too far, let’s start with an understanding of what we mean by the two key parts of the theme:
We’ve learned over the past 20 years that the words “balanced scorecard” can mean very different things to different people—everything from a spreadsheet of performance measures to a fully integrated strategic planning and management system.We favor the latter description: it’s a system that provides structure for strategy formulation, improves communication clarity, aligns employees to organization goals, prioritizes work and resources, identifies the measures that matter, and enables continuous improvement in processes and organization performance.
This conference will explore these topics—the components of a strategy execution process. Through presentations, conversations, and workshops the goal of this conference is to deepen our understanding of how to execute good strategy well, through:Leadership and innovation, at all levels of an organizationpositive reinforcement communication claritya strategy focusdeveloping meaningful plans that can be implementedmeasuring and evaluatingand creating a continuous improvement culture focused on results and accountability
We finally put down in words what we are passionate about. I’ve been working on the book for eight years and it’s nice to move on to something else! My personal thanks to the other authors—it took four of us to finally get it to press. You all have a copy of it; if you need more copies we have a few with us for sale or you can go on our Web site or on Amazon or iTunes to get a hardcopy or a download.
I often get asked where is the balanced scorecard and the Institute are headed.Let me now turn over the podium to Conor Crimmins, the COO of Spider Strategies.
We have a terrific agenda for this year’s conference.We will begin with a wonderful Opening Keynote right after this introduction. Margot Carmichael Lester will be sharing her insights on Communicating for Change.We have presentation from roughly 16 different people over the next two days. Our presenters and panelists will include members of the BSI and Spider Strategies Leadership Teams, Customers, Strategic Partners, and global partners. These presentations include panel discussions, user case studies, Demonstrations, and Q&A Sessions.As you saw from the program, we’ll discuss topics around Alignment, Cascading, Strategic Leadership, Automation, Performance Analytics, and of course – QuickScore.What makes this conference different – intimate group, direct access to BSI/Spider leadership, and an ability to engage in frank discussion and provide input.
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If you would like to follow the presentations as they are given today and tomorrow, please go to this link on your laptop or mobile device. You’ll also be able to download the presentations from this same link.We’ll also be interviewing people during the conference, and we’ll make those videos available also, so you can show all your friends what a good time you had in Myrtle Beach! And make them jealous that they couldn’t come along also.
If you have any needs or problems with the conference, let us know – we can help and will work to fix it for you.Cell phones / Email / Bathrooms / Refreshmentscourtesy