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Course : F0942 Management Control System

Year
: 2013-2014

Combination of Measures and Other


Remedies to the Myopia Problem

Slide 11.3

Chapter 11:
Combinations of Measures and
Other Remedies to the Myopia Problem

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.4

We seek
a measure,
or a combination of measures,
that leads managers and employees to take
the right actions or make the right decisions
in order to create long-term value.

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.5

But
Financial measures of performance often are not, by
themselves, sufficient to motivate optimal management
decisions.
Worse, financial measures often create pressures for
short-term performance potentially at the expense of
long-term value creation.
The myopia problem

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.6

Overcoming myopia

Measure changes in shareholder value directly


Measurement precision and objectivity of future cash flows?

Control investments with preaction reviews


Operating expenses
Today businesses

Financial results controls

Developmental expenses
Tomorrow businesses

Combination of nonfinancial
performance indicators
and action controls

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.7

Overcoming myopia (Continued)

Improve accounting profit measures


Adjust depreciable lives of fixed assets, adopt
current value depreciation, charge depreciation
for older assets
Capitalize expenditures related to long term
investments
Recognize profits more quickly
Impute a cost of equity on income statement
Put leases on the balance sheet, etc.

Cost of developing performance reports for


control purposes?
Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.8

Overcoming myopia (Continued)

Extend the measurement horizon


Measurement congruence

The longer the period of measurement, the


higher the correlation between accounting
income and economic income.

Use long-term incentive plans?

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.9

Overcoming myopia (Continued)

Reduce pressure for short-term profit


Reduce the weighting placed on the annual profit
target and emphasize other, longer-term performance
indicators, such as market share and technical breakthroughs.
Use subjective performance evaluations?
Make the short-term profit targets easier to achieve
Some slack is created to fund longer-term projects
But, motivational effects of easy targets?

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.10

Overcoming myopia (Continued)

Measure a set of drivers of future financial


performance
Use nonfinancial performance measures
Balanced scorecard
The BSC includes financial measures that tell the
results of actions already taken.
It complements the financial measures with operational
measures on customer satisfaction, internal processes,
and the firms innovation and improvement activities.

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.11

The Balanced Scorecard


Financial Perspective
How do we look to
our shareholders?
Customer Perspective
How do we look to
our customers?

Vision
Strategy

Business Processes
What business
processes are the
value drivers?

Learning and Growth


Are we able to sustain
innovation, change and
improvement?
Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.12

A Good Balanced Scorecard


Tells the Story of Your Strategy

Every measure is part of a chain of cause-andeffect linkages.

All measures eventually link to organizational


outcomes.

A balance exists between outcome measures


(financial, customer) and performance drivers
(customer value, internal processes, learning
and growth).
Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.13

Why do Companies Need a BSC?


The source of value has shifted from tangible to intangible assets

percentage of market value related to


Intangible
Assets

38%

62%

Tangible
Assets

62%

38%

85%

15%
1982

19922

20003

Slide adapted from Robert S. Kaplan, Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, A Palladium company: reprinted with permission
Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.14

Creating value from intangible assets


is different
Intangible assets do not have a direct impact on financial
results They have second- or third-order impacts
1

Training
Service
Quality

Customer
Confidence

Customer
Retention

Revenue

Information
Technology

Slide adapted from Robert S. Kaplan, Balanced Scorecard Collaborative, A Palladium company: reprinted with permission
Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.15

Evaluating the BSC-approach


Are BSCs balanced?
What is the proper weighting to achieve balance
Among the four perspectives?
Among the two dozen measures?
Average weights in a study of 60 BSC firms by Towers Perrin
(1996):
Financial
56%
Customer
Internal business
Innovation and learning
Other

19%
12%
5%
8%

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.16

We never figured out how to use the scorecard


to measure performance. We used it to transfer
information, a lot of information, from the divisions
to the senior management team. At the end of the
day, however, your performance depended on
your ability to meet your targets for contribution
to bottom-line profits.
-- Senior manager in a large financial institution.
Quoted in M.C. Jensen, Value maximization, Stakeholder Theory,
and the Corporate Objective Function, Journal of Applied
Corporate Finance (Fall 2001), p. 19.

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.17

Evaluating the BSC-approach (Continued)


Do employees make the right tradeoffs?
For example, throughput and labor productivity are possible
measures in the internal business process perspective, and costs
and profits are common measures in the financial perspective.
- Throughput can be increased by forcing employees to work
more overtime, but as fatigue sets in, labor productivity will
decrease.
- The overtime is also costly, so there is a cross-dimension
tradeoff between throughput and many financial measures,
such as costs and profits.

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.18

Evaluating the BSC-approach (Continued)


How to tie BSC-performance to incentives?
In the short term, tying incentive compensation of

managers to a balanced set of scorecard measures will


foster commitment to overall organizational goals, rather
than suboptimization within functional departments
Whether such linkages should be explicit or applied
judgmentally will likely vary from company to company.
More knowledge will undoubtedly continue to be
accumulated in the years ahead
-- Kaplan and Norton, 1996

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.19

Evaluating the BSC-approach (Continued)


How to measure important nonfinancial areas?

Extremely
Important

High Quality
of Measurement

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Not at all
Important

Extremely
Poor Quality
of Measurement

Slide adapted from David F. Larcker

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.20

Bottom-line measures
Are like a compass leading managers in the
desired direction.
Allow managers greater autonomy
The managers can decide what intermediate measures
to focus on to achieve the desired financial result.
The managers can achieve the desired financial result
by putting different combinations of inputs and outputs
together.

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.21

Baskets of measures
Are like a roadmap that provides guidance to
managers as to how to achieve the desired end.
If done well, can provide a linked cascading of
measures from the top of the organization to the
bottom. They show everybody how their efforts
contribute to the overall goal.
Can be restrictive (managers have less autonomy
in making the tradeoffs).
Propensity to become obsolete as conditions
change.

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

Slide 11.22

But

Complexity provides challenges:


identifying right measures, measurement rules,
and importance weightings
developing the measurement systems
setting properly challenging performance targets
for many measures
linking to incentive compensation
Keeping up-to-date

Kenneth A. Merchant and Wim A. Van der Stede, Management Control Systems, 2nd Edition Pearson Education Limited 2007

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