A Microsoft Scorecard

Microsoft’s scorecards define the major goals of the company and are refined by sales groups, subsidiaries, and individual managers to map their specific activities to corporate goals.

This scorecard shows how a Microsoft manager in charge of OEM sales in a subsidiary might map specific measurements to commitments that he has made that will help the company achieve its high-level goals. (This chart is based on a published Microsoft scorecard, but has been adapted here—with fewer Microsoft-specific acronyms, for example—to make it easier for Update readers to understand. Numbers and goals here are for example purposes only.)

The left column shows the major goals—win customers, drive satisfaction, grow the business, innovate, and people—that are found on all Microsoft scorecards in the Sales, Marketing, and Solutions Group (SMSG), headed by Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner.

The middle column shows specific commitments made by the OEM group in the subsidiary that will help Microsoft achieve those goals. To support the goal of innovation, for example, the group might focus on the relatively new practice of using free trial copies of Office 2007 preloaded on new PCs (“Office-Ready” PCs) as a way to increase sales of Office 2007. (When customers convert a trial version of the product to a fully licensed version, they must pay Microsoft for an activation key.)