Look at a map of the world drawn upside down. It’s a good way to challenge your assumptions about the way the world is — especially which continents and oceans are bigger and which are smaller. Looking at the business world upside down has a similar effect: It challenges your assumptions about company characteristics and what they mean for an organization.
Are Your Company’s Strengths Really Weaknesses?
In a dynamic business world, things sometimes flip completely: The apparent strengths of a company can quickly turn into weaknesses — as a small and seemingly unimportant rival manages to leverage the larger firm’s size and capabilities against it. Conversely, a company’s apparent deficiencies may become advantages. Consider what’s happening in aerospace, where the new venture SpaceX lacks the financial resources of its established competitors and, as a result, has had to innovate ways to slash its production costs, which the large incumbents would now be hard pressed to copy. Similar dynamics are playing out in education and in the coffee retail market in China. To foresee such potential reversals, executives need to perform a new kind of SWOT analysis, carefully examining whether organizations’ strengths may in fact pose a threat to their future and whether supposed weaknesses could actually be opportunities.