Robert S. Kaplan

Robert S. Kaplan is Senior Fellow and Marvin Bower Professor of Leadership Development, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He joined the HBS 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. Kaplan has co-developed both activity-based costing (ABC) and the Balanced Scorecard (BSC), widely recognized as seminal contributions to management theory and practice. His current research applies these two innovations to important problems at the intersection of business and society.

Since 2010, he has collaborated with Michael Porter on the HBS Value Based Health Care initiative, enabling time-driven activity-based costing to become a global standard for health care costing. He and Porter have become leading advocates to replace fee-for-service with value-based bundled payments to motivate providers to deliver superior patient outcomes at lower societal cost.

In 2021, Kaplan partnered with Oxford professor Karthik Ramanna to create the E-liability carbon accounting method, the first system to accurately measure and report corporate greenhouse gas emissions across corporate supply and distribution chains. The approach, readily extendible to societal and other environmental outcomes, is the first rigorous approach for ESG reporting.

In a third research stream, conducted as Palladium thought leader, Kaplan extends the Balanced Scorecard strategy execution for inclusive-growth regional ecosystems. These generate strong financial returns while transforming the socio-economic and environmental conditions of residents in low-income communities around the world.

He also continues research and teaching on enterprise risk management with Anette Mikes and Dutch Leonard.

Kaplan has authored or co-authored 14 books and more than 200 papers, including three dozen in Harvard Business Review. He has co-authored five books with David P. Norton: The Execution Premium: Linking Strategy to Operations for Competitive Advantage; Alignment; Strategy Maps (named as one of the top ten business books of 2004 by Strategy & Business and amazon.com);, The Strategy-Focused Organization (named by Cap Gemini Ernst & Young as the best international business book for year 2000); and The Balanced Scorecard: Translating Strategy into Action, which has been translated into 24 languages and won the 2001 Wildman Medal from the American Accounting Association (AAA) for its impact on practice. He also co-authored Time-Driven Activity-Based Costing with Steve Anderson; Cost and Effect with Robin Cooper; and Relevance Lost: The Rise and Fall of Management Accounting, with H. Thomas Johnson, which received the AAA Seminal Contributions to Literature Award in 2007.

Kaplan received a B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from M.I.T., a Ph.D. in Operations Research from Cornell University, and honorary doctorates from four international universities. Elected to the Accounting Hall of Fame in 2006, he received the Outstanding Accounting Educator Award in 1988 from the AAA, the 1994 CIMA Award from the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants (UK), and Lifetime Contribution Awards from the Management Accounting Section of the AAA (2006) and the Institute of Management Accountants (2008).