The measures are used to monitor progress toward accomplishing the objectives. Measures don’t stand alone. They belong to specific strategic objectives. In the prior example, the measure for Grow International Sales could be “$ in International Sales” and the measure for Local Sales & Support could be the “Number of Trained Resellers outside the U.S.” Targets are established for the measures, along with the logic for color bands so reports can easily show if a particular measure is red, yellow or green (or perhaps some other color, depending on the logic that is used.) There are often multiple targets for different time horizons. For example, the target for international sales may be $10 million for the third quarter and $12 million for the fourth quarter of the current year. For the fourth quarter, red may be defined as less than $11 million and yellow as $11 million up to $12 million in international sales for that quarter.

Strategic initiatives (often just called initiatives) are the specific projects, outside the normal activities of the organization, that are undertaken specifically to help accomplish the strategy or close the gap between a measure and the target. Initiatives almost always have start dates and end dates and a focus on accomplishing something that will support the accomplishment of the particular strategic objective as measured by that objective’s measure. For example, in the case of the software company wanting to grow internationally, an initiative might be something like, “Develop a list of possible resellers outside the U.S.” In contrast, something like “Pursue partnering opportunities” is too vague to be a good initiative, and it is not likely to have a start and end date. (That could be an objective—perhaps on a supporting scorecard for the business development department—and it would then need to have a measure associated with it.) On the other hand, the details surrounding each of the on-going sales and marketing activities to recruit new partners are probably best treated as tactical or operational information rather than a series of strategic initiatives. If too many operational tasks get treated as strategic initiatives, the clutter can diffuse the focus on the critical strategic initiatives.

The concept of cascading involves taking the top level organizational strategy, as clarified by the objectives on the strategy map, and rolling that down to lower levels of the organization, such as business units, divisions, departments or individuals. The process of cascading is not just a matter of pushing the same measures down to other parts of the organization. Instead, the same type of cause and effect thinking that is used to create the strategy map should be used to link the objectives from lower parts of the organization to the higher level objectives on the top level scorecard. In the above software company example, the business development department may have objectives for participating in foreign trade shows or for having meetings with the executives of potential reseller partners in foreign countries. The IT department may have objectives relating to the infrastructure needed as prerequisites for deploying a secure partner extranet. Those objectives, if successfully accomplished, would advance the execution of this company’s strategy by enabling improved international channel support, and therefore contribute to the financial objectives of growing international sales and generating sustained profits. The cascaded objectives should have tight cause and effect alignment with the top-level objectives, but they are not the same objectives, and they are not likely to have the same measures.