SWOT (of) This Fat Woman

I’ve worked for several companies, and the ones I’ve been at for more than 3 years, or that have existed for more than 3 years and have also had a few employees who have also been around at least that long, always have this in common—the same problems continue and the same, or at least very similar, solutions come up. And when they do, they either:

• Get laughed at (the futility of it all!)


• Scoffed at (we’ve tried that before—gong!), or. . .


• Brushed off and tried again because the timing, circumstances, players, tools, or attitudes have somehow changed—and it was a good idea to start with.
  

The companies that give up get shut down. I’ve been in a few of those too.

Another thing that winning companies that I’ve been part of do is strategize their next steps by doing a SWOT analysis.

This is not to be confused with SWAT. When I Googled SWOT team, I got this image (found on http://blog.technicalmanagementinstitute.com/2008/03/innovative-swot.html with photo courtesy of N.Trung by someone else making a play about the 2 acronyms):

SWAT stands for Special Weapons and Tactics. (Does that look like a smoking ham hanging from the ceiling to you?)

It’s also what you do to a fly.
(Fly swatting photo from: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1050305/Splat-Scientists-work-perfect-way-swat-fly.html

Or in some cases, apparently, both:

http://www.sidekickstudios.com/gallery1.html

SWOT, on the other hand, stands for Strengths, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Threats. Really good companies create multiple SWOT lists at all levels, letting people at all key divisions participate and define authority to make changes. Their images look more like this.
(graph from: http://www.excelsia.ch/htmlgb/blog/index.php?entry=entry090108-234052)

And this:
(graph from: http://www.coachingcosmos.com/17.html)




And here's another good one:

I'm going to be working on my own list of Strenghs, Opportunities, Weaknesses, and Threats when it comes to getting to a healthy weight. . . I'll share. Think it might help you to do it too?

from: http://www.worldwideassociates.co.uk/marketing_strategy_swot.htm)