Building Strategy Maps, Part Two: Testing the Hypothesis

In Part One of this series, "Planning the Campaign" (BSR, November/December 2000), we described how to translate the broad corporate vision into an outline of a strategy. In Part Two, we look at the strategy map as hypothesis, a set of assumptions to be continually tested and revised. Statistical correlation analysis offers powerful new ways to test the hypothesis--and often yields surprising insights that can have strategic and bottom-line implications.