International business performance expert to share strategic planning findings with Leaders audience

He is acknowledged as one of the world's best speakers on the subject of business excellence and will be one of the star turns at this year's Leaders in Dubai Business Forum 2007 to be held at the Dubai International Convention Centre from November 18-20.

Dr Kaplan is a Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School and was a co-creator of the Balanced Scorecard, a tool for aligning current actions to strategic objectives. His methods have been successfully adopted by corporate heavyweights and public sector enterprises around the world.

His 13 books and 16 Harvard Business Review articles over the past 25 years have transformed the measurement and managemet of business strategy.

Dr Kaplan will tell Leaders delegates why fewer than 10 per cent of effectively formulated business strategies are successfully implemented - and how this can be changed by using the Balanced Scorecard. He will explain how strategy maps built upon 3-5 high level strategic themes enable organisations to align their strategic initiatives, processes, people and information technology for superior performance.

"Talk's cheap," Dr Kaplan says. "Success comes from taking all those great ideas that come from your strategic planning sessions and actually organizing around them and embedding them into your daily operations. That's where strategy maps play a critical role."

Other confirmed speakers for this year's Leaders in Dubai Business Forum 2007, include former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan; Nobel Prize winner Professor Muhammad Yunus; entrepreneur Sir Richard Branson; business strategy gurus Philip Kotler and Steve Forbes; plus Google's Nikesh Arora.