Back in the 1980s, business guru and best-selling author Tom Peters pitched a relatively simple approach to corporate success, one that he said was proven to deliver far greater dividends than any amount of computer processing and bean counting: MBWA, or “Management By Walking Around.”

That is, the companies that performed best were the ones whose managers actively went out into the trenches and listened to and engaged with their employees. MBWA was first practiced by HP’s David Packard in the 1940s. But by the time the computer age was in full swing four decades later, Peters felt the art of MBWA needed reviving in a world being overrun by MBA thinking that stressed system-based approaches over human intelligence.

Now, the developer of the Balance Scorecard – the ultimate expression of system-based approaches – appears to be suggesting that we need a little more MBWA to augment our highly developed, but still flawed, analytic approaches to business problems.

According to a report in SearchCIO, in light of the recent troubles the financial services sector has gotten itself into, Robert Kaplan, who created the Balanced Scorecard more than two decades ago, wants to add an additional dimension: risk management.

Kaplan’s Balanced Scorecard framework – used widely in many companies – measures factors such as revenues and profits, marketing and sales budgets, and various enterprise inputs such as customer relationship management, processes, employee skills and IT systems. Tools and platforms such as business intelligence, data warehouses, and Web 2.0-based tools help provide the inputs needed to populate Balanced Scorecards. However, all this technology is still not reaching the decision makers who need the information, Kaplan is quoted as saying at a recent Gartner summit. “There’s plenty of technology. Technology is not the issue; it’s a management issue,” he said.

That’s what got financial services companies into hot water during the recent financial crises, Kaplan said. “Financial performance is a lag indicator,” Kaplan is quoted as telling a recent Gartner summit. “Now we’re seeing the consequences of not making risk management a strategic part of strategy, such as the riskiness of corporate investments that have resulted in huge losses to financial services firms.”

Part of the risk management process means executives need to keep their ears to the ground. For example, he cited an example of a CEO who used the Balanced Scorecard methodology as part of random visits to employees at their desks with a visual strategy map. Kaplan urged companies to follow this example and even develop “dashboards for employees so they can drill down and see the links between objectives, how individuals and teams play a role in that end goal, and how the success of that objective is measured.”

We now have state-of-the-art technology and methodologies that help us analyze, predict, and plot the directions of our businesses. But it’s even more critical than ever for managers and leaders to engage, on a dily basis, with the people that will make that success happen.