I work for TAM Plc which carries on the work of Albert Humphrey, with all the original case studies and documents that evolved from Humph’s researsh at SRI.

I read your criticism re swot and quite correctly swot cannot be run on its own it does leave weaknesses – SWOT was devised as part of TEAM ACTION MANAGEMENT and doesn’t work as a solitary tool.
Brief History on SOFT & SWOT

SWOT analysis came from the research conducted at Stanford Research Institute from 1960-1970. The background to SWOT stemmed 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 failure. The Research Team were Marion Dosher, Dr Otis Benepe, Albert Humphrey, Robert Stewart, Birger Lie.
It all began with the corporate planning trend, which seemed to appear first at Du Pont in 1949. By 1960 every Fortune 500 company had a ‘corporate planning manager’ (or equivalent) and ‘associations of long range corporate planners’ had sprung up in both the USA and the UK.

However a unanimous opinion developed in all of these companies that corporate planning in the shape of long range planning was not working, did not pay off, and was an expensive investment in futility.
It was widely held that managing change and setting realistic objectives which carry the conviction of those responsible was difficult and often resulted in questionable compromises.

The fact remained, despite the corporate and long range planners, that the one and only missing link was how to get the management team agreed and committed to a comprehensive set of action programmes.

To create this link, starting in 1960, Robert F Stewart at SRI in Menlo Park California lead a research team to discover what was going wrong with corporate planning, and then to find some sort of solution, or to create a system for enabling management teams agreed and committed to development work, which today we call ‘managing change’.

The research carried on from 1960 through 1969. 1100 companies and organizations were interviewed and a 250-item questionnaire was designed and completed by over 5,000 executives. Seven key findings lead to the conclusion that in corporations chief executive should be the chief planner and that his immediate functional directors should be the planning team. Dr Otis Benepe defined the ‘Chain of Logic’ which became the core of system designed to fix the link for obtaining agreement and commitment.

1. Values
2. Appraise
3. Motivation
4. Search
5. Select
6. Programme
7. Act
8. Monitor and repeat steps 1 2 and 3

We discovered that we could not change the values of the team nor set the objectives for the team so we started as the first step by asking the appraisal question ie what’s good and bad about the operation. We began the system 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. This was called the SOFT analysis.

When this was presented to Urick and Orr in 1964 at the Seminar in Long Range Planning at the Dolder Grand in Zurich Switzerland they changed the F to a W and called it SWOT Analysis.
SWOT was then promoted in Britain by Urick and Orr as an exercise in and of itself. As such it has no benefit.

Regards

Janet Taylor – Operations Manager TAM (UK) Plc