Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2008 in the subject Business economics - Business Management, Corporate Governance, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Berlin (Master of Business Administration), course: Strategic Management, language: English, abstract: If you take the words of a former General Electrics (GE) employee to define strategy, William E. Rothschild said, “What do you want to achieve or avoid? The answers to this question are objectives. How will you go about achieving your desired results? The answer to this you can call strategy.” This statement not only highlights the need for strategy but also the need to bring strategy to fruition. Companies should not only devise strategy but also successfully clarify and execute their strategies. This means that a company has to be able to measure its strategic success.Unfortunately, company strategy is not always transparent or understood in the same way by a company’s key players. Sun Tzu, a Chinese military strategist who wrote the military treatise The Art of War, praised this aspect for strategies in war as follows: “All men can see these tactics whereby I conquer, but what none can see is the strategy out of which victory is evolved”.The Strategy Map created by Kaplan and Norton is to facilitate corporate strategy development and execution providing a missing link between strategy formulation and strategy implementation by identifying the key internal processes that drive strategic success and by aligning investment in people, technology and organizational capital for the greatest impact.The first part of the assignment describes in detail the theoretical framework of Strategy Maps. The second part uses the theory to describe and visualize the Strategy Map of General Electric Medical Systems (GEMS) – the world’s leading manufacturer of diagnostic imaging equipment. This practical approach is based on the publication of Tarun Khanna about GEMS in the Harvard Business School Press in February 2003. In conclusion, there is a brief up-to-date situation on GEMS after 2002 and some statements to the authors’ experience in creating the GEMS Strategy Map.
