Strategy and SWOT (Part 1 of 3)
March 4th, 2007At some point in your career, you’re going to be asked to put together a strategy session for your organization. This is when most managers start to panic.
But take heart. Probably, your boss does not want you to set strategy for the whole organization. What she wants is for you to come up with a process to help the leadership team determine its strategy. And that’s good, because most of us are unlikely to be imminently qualified to be setting strategy.
But how do you set up the process? There are a number of different ways, all of which have various merits. You’ll likely ask around and some b-school grads will tell you all about Porter’s Five Forces and Blue Ocean and Dear God one hopes Peter Drucker, and etc, etc. But as always, the question comes back to, “what do I do?” The answers you’ll get to that question will include some mention of the SWOT Analysis, which stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. While SWOT is NOT the complete process, it is a great start to getting a handle on where your organization is and where it might need to go.
In this cast, we’ll tell you how to set up a basic SWOT session, the Manager Tools way.
Members-Only 
Premium 
Interviewing Series
Stumble it!Trackback URL for this post: http://www.manager-tools.com/2007/03/strategy-and-swot/trackback/
March 6th, 2007 at 3:18 pm
GREAT topic!!! Thank you guys,
PierG
http://pierg.wordpress.com
March 7th, 2007 at 9:21 am
We just went over this concept in my Marketing class. I liked the concept as soon as I heard it, and now I like it even more.
March 10th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
Great subject and almost perfect timing!
We are in the middle of a SWOT analysis at our local YMCA. Time is standing still while waiting to find out how to do it the MT way!
I hope that there will be a MT SWOT Tool in the future.
KEEP UP THE EXCELLENT WORK.
It is a pleasure being your student!
March 19th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Catching up from having been gone for a couple weeks. Anyone else out there been to Cameroon, Africa? Amazing place.
Anyway… I found the comments during this podcast quite amusing regarding many managers’ (or B-school students) considering “strategy” jobs or assignments to be exciting, intriguing, and very desirable (my paraphrase). In contrast, however, at the large company where I’ve worked for 20+ years, when an executive (C level and above) is assigned to a “strategy” position he/she is most likely being put in the “penalty box” for “sins committed”. This occurred within the last 4 months in my own reporting chain to an exec who had been a star up until the last 1.5 years when he failed to manage his headcount/budgets to the tune of overruns of several million dollars. To a man, those in the know with whom I’ve chatted about this have said: “Yep, big time penalty box move.”
I’ve seen this occur at least 3 other times to various senior execs over the last 10 years. I.e., strategy position = punishment. Not bad punishment, though. You keep your exec position, salary, perqs, etc. but have less responsibility and more time to play golf. Sorry, Evil Al showing there…
Be careful what you wish for.
Al
March 20th, 2007 at 9:11 am
[…] Listen to Episode 1, 2 and 3 and leave some feedback. […]
March 22nd, 2007 at 2:22 am
Al-
Sure, that’s right…(though it wasn’t 15 years ago).
But DOING strategy work and being in a strategy role are two different things.
Mark
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:21 am
I related well to the verse from John Brown’s Body. I thought that the podcast indicated that this was on the BLOG. My searching so far has not located the verse. Can you direct me to this?
Really am enjoying the podcast. It’s making the commute bearable.
March 23rd, 2007 at 10:48 am
Boomer1-
Click on the “list of all articles” link and go to April 2006. It’s “My Favorite Leadership Quote”.
;-)
Mark
March 24th, 2007 at 1:46 pm
I can not fine the sample for the SWOT podcast.