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Swot – What is a swot in business?
A SWOT analysis can be carried out for a company, product, place, industry, or person.
It involves specifying the objective of the business venture or project and identifying the internal and external factors that are favorable and unfavorable to achieve that objective.
Users of SWOT analysis must ask and answer questions that generate meaningful information for each category (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) to make the analysis useful and find their competitive advantage
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- Strengths: characteristics of the business or project that give it an advantage over others
- Weaknesses: characteristics of the business that place the business or project at a disadvantage relative to others
- Opportunities: elements in the environment that the business or project could exploit to its advantage
- Threats: elements in the environment that could cause trouble for the business or project elements like risks that could cause trouble for the business…
Internal and External factors
So it is said that; if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss. If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself.
The Art of War The art of war by Sun Tzuby Sun Tzu
SWOT analysis aims to identify the key internal and external factors seen as important to achieving an objective. SWOT analysis groups key pieces of information into two main categories:
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- Internal factors – the strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization
- External factors – the opportunities and threats presented by the environment external to the organization
Analysis may view the internal factors as strengths or as weaknesses depending upon their effect on the organization’s objectives.
What may represent strengths with respect to one objective may be weaknesses (distractions, competition) for another objective
Strategy building
SWOT analysis can be used effectively to build organizational or personal strategy.
For instance, strong relations between strengths and opportunities can suggest good conditions in the company and allow using an aggressive strategy.
On the other hand, strong interactions between weaknesses and threats could be analyzed as a potential warning and advice for using a defensive strategy.