In August 2008, Magic Technology ("Magic") launched an initiative to implement the balanced scorecard in its organisation. Alan Lo, the chief executive officer, oversaw the implementation of the balanced scorecard at the company's headquarters. Lo encountered both strategic and execution difficulties during implementation, such as too many strategic objectives, too many strategic performance indicators and a diverse focus of strategic action plans. Yet, such difficulties hinted at a more fundamental issue of too many formulated strategic directions in the first place. In late 2009, Lo was in the middle of the execution phase to push the implementation of the balanced scorecard towards the department level. How would the difficulties encountered influence the initiative of the implementation of the balanced scorecard at the department level?

In 2002, Worldclass Lighting launched an initiative to introduce the balanced scorecard into the Asia Pacific and Greater China regions, in order to provide a new management tool for its lighting business covering four perspectives-financial, customer, process, and learning and growth. The balanced scorecard ran successfully for a period of time until implementation issues surfaced that undermined its benefits, such as unquantifiable measures in target setting and the over-measurement of indicators. In 2009, a plan to terminate the balanced scorecard was presented to the Asia Pacific Chief Executive Officer ("AP CEO"). The AP CEO must now make a decision about whether to continue using the balanced scorecard.