Robert S. Kaplan


Robert Samuel Kaplan is an American accounting academic, and Emeritus Professor of Leadership Development at the Harvard Business School, known as co-creator, together with David P. Norton, of the Balanced Scorecard.

Biography

Kaplan obtained his BS in Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he also obtained his MS in Electrical Engineering. For his graduate studies he moved to the Cornell University, where he obtained his PhD in Operations Research. Since the 1990s he has been awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Stuttgart in 1994, the University of Lodz in 2006, and the University of Waterloo in 2008.
Kaplan joined the Harvard Business School faculty in 1984 after spending 16 years on the faculty of the business school at Carnegie-Mellon University, where he served as Dean from 1977 to 1983.
After his graduation Kaplan started his academic career at Tepper School of Business at Carnegie-Mellon University in 1968, and served as its dean from 1977 to 1983. In 1984 he moved to the Harvard Business School, where he was appointed Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development.
In 2006, Kaplan was named to the Accounting Hall of Fame. In the same year he also received the Lifetime Contribution Award from the Management Accounting Section of the American Accounting Association.

Work

Balanced Scorecard

Kaplan and David P. Norton created the Balanced Scorecard, a means of linking a company's current actions to its long-term goals. Kaplan and Norton introduced the balanced scorecard method in their 1992 Harvard Business Review article, The Balanced Scorecard: Measures That Drive Performance.
This method has been endorsed by companies from every industry and corner of the world as evidenced by the Palladium Balanced Scorecard Hall of Fame for Executing Strategy and Bain & Company's Management Tools and Trends report. He has also published in the fields of strategy, cost accounting and management accounting. He is a co-founder, with David P. Norton, of ESM Software Group, and has been integrally involved in the thought leadership work of Palladium International and its past iterations. Norton and Kaplan remain affiliated with Palladium.
Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing
Kaplan and Steven Anderson co-developed time-driven activity-based costing, or TDABC, a methodology for companies to fully understand costs and to assist them to get on a simpler and more powerful path to increased profits. Most recently, this methodology is being applied to healthcare, in order to measure health care delivery costs across an entire care continuum, at the medical condition level.
Kaplan is also a prolific case writer and have featured among the top 40 case authors consistently, since the list was first published in 2016 by The Case Centre. He ranked 32nd In 2018/19, 12th in 2017/18, 18th in 2016/17 and 12th in 2015/16.
He also featured on the list of The Case Centre's all-time top authors list released in 2014.

Selected publications

Books and Textbooks, a selection:
Articles, a selection: