Hindsight is 20/20 or so they say. I bet after this weeks grilling on congressional hill CEO Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan Chase is wishing he had some better vision going into the current scenario. As a CEO, Dimon told the committee that he relied on his executives and that he was “allowed to rely on them”. Sadly, although true, relying on others is often the kiss of death for a corporate CEO. Many have exited after failed strategy when they had been consistently assured by their team things were going well. So, how does a CEO know what is really going on? He or she must look at the execution progress on a regular basis with real indicators not platitudes or assurances. I can’t posit that the outcome for JP Morgan Chase would have been any different, but I can at least say that the CEO would have had the ability to know what was happening in real time and if he was able to avert disaster, he may have. That said, I don’t suggest that his team was keeping things from him, only that their data was not necessarily as good as it should have been and as the information traveled up the corporation the issues became more diffuse.
Most scorecards are like school report cards. They take data, after the fact, look at it in terms of stated goals and rate the outcome. Great information, but often too late. At CNC we offer a different kind of scorecard. Our SES (Strategic Execution Scorecard) tells you how you are doing on execution WHILE you are working on your strategy. It gives the leaders a way to look at how well things are going in real time. It bases its reporting on the current use of people, money and resources to evaluate if in fact they are deployed as they should be to execute on a goal. This information, in a real time scenario may well be the silver bullet for CEOs who want to be on top of their strategic execution. 
