Swatting SWOT
SWOT analysis is one of the best-known of all theoretical frameworks in management. Adrian Haberberg suggests that it has outlived its usefulness.
Perhaps more than any other piece of management theory, the analysis of organisations' Strengths, Weaknesses, and of the Opportunities and Threats confronting them, has struck a chord with practising managers. Simple to understand, and blessed with a catchy acronym, SWOT analysis is widely used as a tool for the evaluation of a firm's position. Managers not only believe that it is useful ? research in both the UK and the USA has found that they also think of it as having a strong foundation in theory and empirical research.
In this, however, they are mistaken. Nobody really knows who invented SWOT analysis, though it was certainly being used by Harvard Business School academics during the 1960s. There is no piece of underlying theory that shows how, by examining strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and only those four factors, we can arrive at a complete appraisal of an organisation's position. In fact, SWOT bears all the hallmarks of a gadget that a professor sketched out on the back of an envelope one day, and that just caught on!
However, there are good reasons for believing that SWOT analysis may have had its day. Some of the objections to it are practical: the technique's seductive simplicity seems to lead people to use it sloppily, so that the results really are not that helpful. There are also theoretical objections ? in the light of what we have learnt about the nature of competitive advantage over the last thirty years, the four SWOT factors are no longer enough for an assessment of an organisation's position.
The Curse of the Three-Word Bullet Point
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