Welcome to our training page. I hope you are here not just because it’s another certificate to get, but because you want to formulate and execute your business strategy better.
Strategy is a way that a company sees: current business challenges, the reasons why they appeared; and the solution that will make everything work properly.
Strategy is not just about indicators (KPIs). I’d say that a strategy is about these 3 components:
- Strategy definition, where one needs to come up with a company’s answer to the business problems and challenges;
- Strategy description, where one formalizes a strategy, e.g. design strategy map, business goals, and KPIs;
- Strategy execution, where a strategy plan is translated and given to the rest of the company and is executed.
The goal of our training is to give you specific approaches to work within these 3 components of the strategy.
Why us? What makes up special?
We are not a classical training company that packs just any information into a “Training/certification” product and sells it. Instead of having an academic background in the topic, we have a strong practical background.
- We have helped companies all over the world to solve their management and measurement-related problems with scorecards. Check out the case study section to get an idea about who our customers are and what kind of problems they have solved.
- We are authors of “BSC Designer” software for the business scorecard. That’s why during the training we are not talking about abstract theory, we are always trying to show how it works in practice. Still, we don’t insist on the usage of our software.
- We have our own KPIs library, as well as a solid experience with designing KPIs that work.
- Our trainers wrote books on Balanced Scorecard, their articles were seen on Forbes, and industry specific strategy magazines. You might have heard them speaking about the strategy at professional conferences.
- We collaborated with business schools to teach business scorecards using working models.
There are a number of training products by other companies that focus on specific business framework only, for example, on the Balanced Scorecard. I believe that it’s always better to focus on the solution of the specific problems, not on the specific tool. We do this by following this principle:
We don’t teach just the scorecard approach; we teach you to work with all 3 aspects of the strategy (definition, description, execution) by using various tools. The Balanced Scorecard is just one of them.
- We don’t teach Balanced Scorecard exclusively; we teach other business frameworks as well that help to address the above-mentioned challenges.
Why should I choose your training, but not one of these expensive programs?
There are various training/certification programs for the Business/Balanced Scorecard available on the market. Most of them suggest an excellent value and are taught by experienced lecturers. But let’s be honest, there are two kinds of training:
- More expensive programs; their certificates give more prestige and value for your CV. The practical part of such programs is normally presented with some cases about scorecards implemented in international companies.
- Less expensive practice-oriented training; their certificates don’t look so impressive on your CV, but give you skills that you can use right now, not just knowledge.
My personal belief is that any Balanced Scorecard training and certification is useless unless you start doing something yourself, and applying specific ideas that you learn about into your business.
- It’s better to describe your strategy using a business scorecard and see how it works in real-life, than be a book-smart guru with knowledge that is not applied.
I always vote for practice. It’s like riding a bicycle:
You can hire the Olympic champion to teach you; you can read many books on the topic (yes, there are such books!), or visit expensive training, but the most important thing is that you start trying to ride.
For our training we don’t hire Olympic champions, but we help you to try all the ideas that we teach as soon as possible.
Do you teach “Business,” “Strategy,” or “Balanced” Scorecard?
Ted Levit once said:
- People don’t buy a quarter-inch drill bit, they buy a quarter-inch hole.
Regarding the Balanced Scorecard I would say:
People don’t need Scorecard, they need a way to describe their complex strategies and then executive them.
For this very reason, in our trainings we are not locked to the Balanced Scorecard concept. It gives a lot of meaningful ideas about strategy description, but we can also learn a lot from other frameworks, like for example 7-S or Hoshin Kanri. For some companies, simpler approaches work much better than complex ones.
Answering the initial question about the terminology:
- Instead of using “Balanced Scorecard” term we prefer to use wider terms like “Business” or “Strategy” Scorecard.
What will I learn?
There are 4 main directions. You can choose to focus on a specific direction or go through all of them:
- We will teach you to work with strategy, e.g. diagnose the problems and come up with a hypothesis about how to solve them.
- Business scorecard. Where we teach you to describe the strategy in a form of business goals, objectives, strategy maps, and initiatives.
- Where we are talking about leading and lagging indicators, finding them, and integrating them into your company’s culture.
- Where you’ll learn how to implement the idea of Business Scorecard into your company’s DNA.
I’d like to mention one important thing: our trainers do not stop learning! Every day we deal with another client, we see another scorecard or strategy map and we learn something new from them.
We don’t give recommendations like: “That is the way you have to do it.” Any business is unique and any concept needs to be aligned with its business realities.
We will diagnose which parts of your strategy process need more attention and suggest to you a training program to address those challenges.
3 formats of the training
We suggest you try 3 different training formats, and then choose one according to your budget and needs.
- Web sessions at $150 US/hour rate. We will teach you via online meeting software (we use Skype and TeamViewer). Our agreement will be session to session, so you are never locked into a long term agreement, our team always has an incentive to make things happen.
- Training on client’s site at $150 US/hour + travel and accommodation costs. This option works great for those clients that are already happy with our training and want to spread the ideas across the company. The most convenient way to do this is to bring a trainer to your site.
If you buy more than 1 hour of training then an hour rate will be reduced to the $120 US/hour.
If you are interested in web sessions or on-site training, then contact us first. Our trainer will get in contact with you to agree on the first free session where we will discuss your current business challenges and the details of the training program that would fit your needs best of all.
Finally, the last option:
- Audio training in MP3 – starting from $216 US for the “Silver” package. If you have a tight budget, but still want to start with Business Scorecards, then you can choose one of the eTraining sessions. Check out the eTraining page, listen to audio samples, and choose the training that you need.
Collaboration with MBA programs
According to the research, the toolkit of the most World executives includes business scorecards. This explains a strong interest from the part of MBA students in modern strategy formulation frameworks. We did an excellent course about Business Scorecards for the Moscow Business School, and we are happy to share our experience with others.
The MBA class room is something special for us. On the one hand, we need to teach the theory of the concept; on the other hand, we want to share some practical experience.
To achieve these two goals we are using examples of real business scorecards, similar to those that companies use.
After “playing” with those projects, students become really enthusiastic about the Business Scorecard approach, and we believe that our first goal was successfully achieved in this case.
Certificate from us
As I mentioned in the very beginning, we are not for people who are just chasing another certificate to put on their wall or to add another line into a CV. Still, we are happy to recognize those who passed our training with a certificate.
The certificate has its unique number, your name on it, and the name of the passed training program.
How can I start with a free session?
Just send us a message telling a little bit about your current business challenges, which might be:
- Strategy definition
- Strategy description with KPIs or strategy map
- Translating of your strategy to other departments
- Or something different
Then, we will agree on a time when we can meet online to discuss the training program that we can offer.