Strategic Directions – Business
Sustain, Delete, Rethink and Add-Innovate
This section includes the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) assessments from 2 teams of business leaders for two distinct business organizations in Canada. The teams focused on discovering strategic directions for these organizations and serves as an applied learning experience for both representative organizations and the leadership teams doing the review. One business organization is a division of an international organization focused in Canada, where one of the business leaders from the Build Trust First Team (BT1), participating with the SWOT process, is a Human Resources (HR) professional with the organization. The other team, Caravan, reviewed the practices and habits of a car rental company in Surrey BC Canada.
Following Ethics Review, both teams conducted interviews with members of the business organizations under SWOT review. The processes used in each investigation were not included in their final reporting, only findings related to the analysis for individual organizations is recorded.
The business teams reviewed various strategic choices for the businesses reviewed by either ‘brain storming’ or ‘brain swarming’ to develop their information and review the SWOT principles in the assessment process. ‘Brain storming’ or ‘brain swarming’ allowed business team members to gain understanding for methodologies in the SWOT process, and assist in developing an effective strategic response to the business organization’s assessment and the strategic influences guiding them into the future. This also helped teams identify the necessary skills for strategically planning to meet the challenges faced in navigating best practices for the future and gaining necessary skills for developing an effective strategic leadership toolkit for themselves.
The business leaders followed the SWOT analysis steps using Richard Lepsinger’s 6 Bridge Building Principles in Closing the Execution Gap (2010), Hughes, Beatty and Dinwoodie’s assessment tools and six step after action review (AAR) process for assessing organizational capacity for change as noted in Becoming a Strategic Leader (2014, pp. 130-134). Using the tools outlined in the texts and assessing developed strategies for the organizations reviewed each team worked to determine the anticipated success or failure of suggested changes for each organization’s future practice and determine the anticipated success for those identified and suggested changes. Teams then submitted their results and findings to determine the likely success or failure in applying the changes to the organizations reviewed in the SWOT Process.
