Swot Analysis

Strategic Management: SWOT analysis’ advantages and disadvantages
Decision-making and problem-solving techniques

Strategic Management is defined as a set of managerial decisions and actions that determines the long-run performance of a corporation. It includes a variety of tools and analysis which help implement, evaluate and control the general strategy of a company. Strategy formulation begins with a situational analysis and it emphasises the monitoring and evaluating of external opportunities and threats in light of a corporation´s strengths and weaknesses (Wheelen and Hunger, 2006; Saloner et al., 2001).
Objective

The objective of this report is to describe, analyse and discuss advantages and disadvantages of a concept named SWOT which is an acronym for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. These concepts are frequently used as tools for analyzing the external environment of an organisation as well as the internal factors that constitutes its structure (Wheelen and Hunger, 2006).
History

SWOT analysis came from a research conducted at Stanford Research Institute in the 1960´s. The creation of the SWOT analysis comes from the need to find out why corporate planning failed. The research was funded by the fortune 500 companies to find out what could be done about this. Albert Humphrey together with his team began testing this tool and it suddenly became a corporate planning trend, which seemed to appear first at Du Pont in 1949 (Morrison, 2009; Friesner, T.,2000).
They created this model by asking what is good and bad about the present and the future. “What is good in the present is Satisfactory, good in the future is an Opportunity; bad in the present is a Fault and bad in the future is a Threat” (Morrison, 2009). This was called the SOFT analysis. When this was presented to Urick and Orr in 1964 at a Seminar in Zurich,