The intensive and profound transformations that contemporary enterprises are undergoing simultaneously force changes in management technology. The fundamental pillars of changes in management technology today are the following principles of management by controlling, i.e., orientation towards:
• the future
• value
• market and customer
• processes
• knowledge.
Orientation towards the future means the necessity of penetrating and anticipating the future by developing various scenarios of its development. Scenarios, being multidimensional images of the future of the environment and the enterprise, provide new knowledge about its possible changes and limit the uncertainty of strategic choices. Orientation towards the future is an immanent feature of strategic thinking, the result of which is the formulation of long-term enterprise goals and strategies for their implementation. Strategy allows for the transformation of the present into the future. The process of strategy implementation (strategic action) may contain various deviations requiring intervention and corrections. The task of controlling is to counteract these deviations, which is expressed in the idea of feed-forward. This phenomenon is illustrated in Fig. 3. At this point, it is also necessary to pay attention to the relationship between strategic controlling and strategic control. Strategic control based on feed-forward includes: premise control, strategic surveillance, and implementation control. Controlling supports strategic control, which without appropriate tools would be merely an empty postulate, impossible to implement, especially in the modern business environment. As G. Osbert-Pociecha notes, controlling activates and deepens strategic control while simultaneously limiting the enterprise’s operational risk. Orientation towards value means that the goal of the enterprise’s operation is to create value for its key stakeholders: shareholders, customers, employees, and society. Managing an enterprise through value sets a task for controlling in the form of providing control norms – value assessment metrics that would comprehensively express a wide spectrum of its external and internal determinants. It should be emphasized that the system of enterprise value assessment metrics in the Western economy has undergone a specific evolution, consisting of the substitution of quantitative (financial) metrics with qualitative ones. An example of qualitative enterprise value assessment is the Balanced Scorecard by R. S. Kaplan and D. P. Norton, which evaluates the effectiveness of strategy implementation in four perspectives: financial, customer, internal processes, and learning and growth. Controlling in the value management process should create informational and methodological foundations serving to:
• correctly formulate enterprise goals in the form of maximizing market value and securing social interests
• generate knowledge about ways to achieve the mentioned goals
• identify the risk of goal implementation
• control the course of goal implementation.
Orientation towards the market and the customer requires continuous analysis of the enterprise’s position in terms of offered products, the served market, competitors, suppliers, and key factors of market advantage. The realization of this orientation is the restructuring of the controlling toolkit, consisting of moving away from the traditional income statement focused on products towards an account focused on customers. Creating value for the customer determines the survival of the enterprise. Orientation towards processes is, according to M. Moszkowicz, the necessity to break with the classic Chandlerian maxim “strategy precedes structure” and replace it with the principle “process is primary to structure”. Orientation towards processes, in accordance with Porter’s value chain, concentrates the enterprise’s activities on actions contributing to the creation of product value.