The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
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Case Study Description of The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit
The western world bought the wrong thinking system from Aristotle, says the author, and this ranks as one of the worst investment decisions we ever made. The thinking system we invested in was Aristotle's 'analytics', which monopolizes what most people characterize as 'thinking.' As a result, our thinking processes remain dominated by the culture of the sciences, and traditional approaches to strategy sit squarely at the table of logic and Science. But Aristotle actually conceived of two thinking systems, not one: he also conceived an entirely different thinking pathway that combined invention, judgment and decision wrapped up in a social process of debate. He called this process 'rhetoric', which the author calls 'design thinking' -- the Second Road to truth. The critical difference between the two roads is best understood by the different domains they address: analytics is the road by which we diagnose what already exists; rhetoric is the road by which we design alternative futures.
Swot Analysis of "The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit" written by Tony Golsby-Smith includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Thinking Road facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, Psychology, Strategic thinking and Strategy & Execution.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit casestudy better are - – talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, challanges to central banks by blockchain based private currencies, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models, increasing energy prices, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google,
increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Thinking Road, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Thinking Road operates in.
According to Harvard Business Review, 75% of the managers use SWOT analysis for various purposes such as – evaluating current scenario, strategic planning, new venture feasibility, personal growth goals, new market entry, Go To market strategies, portfolio management and strategic trade-off assessment, organizational restructuring, etc.
SWOT Objectives / Importance of SWOT Analysis and SWOT Matrix
SWOT analysis of The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Thinking Road
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Strategy & Execution field.
4. Making a Strategy & Execution topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Thinking Road
Strengths The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Thinking Road in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit Harvard Business Review case study are -
Organizational Resilience of Thinking Road
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing that Thinking Road does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Digital Transformation in Strategy & Execution segment
- digital transformation varies from industry to industry. For Thinking Road digital transformation journey comprises differing goals based on market maturity, customer technology acceptance, and organizational culture. Thinking Road has successfully integrated the four key components of digital transformation – digital integration in processes, digital integration in marketing and customer relationship management, digital integration into the value chain, and using technology to explore new products and market opportunities.
Learning organization
- Thinking Road is a learning organization. It has inculcated three key characters of learning organization in its processes and operations – exploration, creativity, and expansiveness. The work place at Thinking Road is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit Harvard Business Review case study emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Thinking Road has highly efficient outsourcing and offshoring strategy. It has resulted in greater operational flexibility and bringing down the costs in highly price sensitive segment. Secondly the value chain collaborators of the firm in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Analytics focus
– Thinking Road is putting a lot of focus on utilizing the power of analytics in business decision making. This has put it among the leading players in the industry. The technology infrastructure suggested by Tony Golsby-Smith can also help it to harness the power of analytics for – marketing optimization, demand forecasting, customer relationship management, inventory management, information sharing across the value chain etc.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Thinking Road in the segment is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Thinking Road are driving operational speed, building greater agility, and keeping the organization nimble to compete with new competitors. It helps are organization to ideate new ideas, and execute them swiftly in the marketplace.
Training and development
– Thinking Road has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit Harvard Business Review case study by analyzing – employees retention, in-house promotion, loyalty, new venture initiation, lack of conflict, and high level of both employees and customer engagement.
Ability to recruit top talent
– Thinking Road is one of the leading recruiters in the industry. Managers in the The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit are in a position to attract the best talent available. The firm has a robust talent identification program that helps in identifying the brightest.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Thinking Road has innovation driven culture where significant part of the revenues are spent on the research and development activities. This has resulted in, as mentioned in case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Strong track record of project management
– Thinking Road is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Diverse revenue streams
– Thinking Road is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided firm in The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit case study a diverse revenue stream that has helped it to survive disruptions such as global pandemic in Covid-19, financial disruption of 2008, and supply chain disruption of 2021.
Weaknesses The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit are -
Skills based hiring
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Thinking Road has created an environment where the organization is dominated by functional specialists rather than management generalist. This has resulted into product oriented approach rather than marketing oriented approach or consumers oriented approach.
Employees’ incomplete understanding of strategy
– From the instances in the HBR case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit, it seems that the employees of Thinking Road don’t have comprehensive understanding of the firm’s strategy. This is reflected in number of promotional campaigns over the last few years that had mixed messaging and competing priorities. Some of the strategic activities and services promoted in the promotional campaigns were not consistent with the organization’s strategy.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of Thinking Road, firm in the HBR case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the segment, Thinking Road needs to come up with a strategy to reduce the workers concern regarding automation. Without a clear strategy, it could lead to disruption and uncertainty within the organization.
High dependence on star products
– The top 2 products and services of the firm as mentioned in the The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit HBR case study still accounts for major business revenue. This dependence on star products in has resulted into insufficient focus on developing new products, even though Thinking Road has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
High bargaining power of channel partners
– Because of the regulatory requirements, Tony Golsby-Smith suggests that, Thinking Road is facing high bargaining power of the channel partners. So far it has not able to streamline the operations to reduce the bargaining power of the value chain partners in the industry.
Lack of clear differentiation of Thinking Road products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Thinking Road needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
No frontier risks strategy
– After analyzing the HBR case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit, it seems that company is thinking about the frontier risks that can impact Strategy & Execution strategy. But it has very little resources allocation to manage the risks emerging from events such as natural disasters, climate change, melting of permafrost, tacking the rise of artificial intelligence, opportunities and threats emerging from commercialization of space etc.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Thinking Road has not been able to do capital spending to the tune of the competition. This has resulted into fewer innovations and company facing stiff competition from both existing competitors and new entrants who are disrupting the industry using digital technology.
High dependence on existing supply chain
– The disruption in the global supply chains because of the Covid-19 pandemic and blockage of the Suez Canal illustrated the fragile nature of Thinking Road supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes mentioned in the HBR case study - The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit, it is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Thinking Road vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee as mentioned in the HBR case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit, is just above the industry average. Thinking Road needs to redesign the compensation structure and incentives to increase the revenue per employees. Some of the steps that it can take are – hiring more specialists on project basis, etc.
Opportunities The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit | External Strategic Factors
What are Opportunities in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The opportunities highlighted in the Harvard Business Review case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit are -
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Thinking Road can build a diversified supply chain model across various countries in - South East Asia, India, and other parts of the world. This reconfiguration of global supply chain can help, as suggested in case study, The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit, to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Developing new processes and practices
– Thinking Road can develop new processes and procedures in Strategy & Execution industry using technology such as automation using artificial intelligence, real time transportation and products tracking, 3D modeling for concept development and new products pilot testing etc.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Thinking Road has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in the industry. This can help Thinking Road to build a more holistic ecosystem as suggested in the The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit case study. Thinking Road can build new products and services such as - data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Thinking Road to expand its talent hiring zone. According to McKinsey Global Institute, 20% of the high end workforce in fields such as finance, information technology, can continously work from remote local post Covid-19. This presents a really great opportunity for Thinking Road to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Thinking Road can leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning to automate the production process, customer analytics to get better insights into consumer behavior, realtime digital dashboards to get better sales tracking, logistics and transportation, product tracking, etc.
Finding new ways to collaborate
– Covid-19 has not only transformed business models of companies in Strategy & Execution industry, but it has also influenced the consumer preferences. Thinking Road can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– Consumer behavior has changed in the Strategy & Execution industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Thinking Road can take advantage of these changes in consumer behavior to build a far more efficient business model. For example consumer regular ordering of products can reduce both last mile delivery costs and market penetration costs. Thinking Road can further use this consumer data to build better customer loyalty, provide better products and service collection, and improve the value proposition in inflationary times.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Thinking Road is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit case study suggests that firm can utilize new technology to build more coordinated teams and streamline operations and communications using tools such as CAD, Zoom, etc.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Thinking Road can make experimentation a productive activity and build a culture of innovation using approaches such as – mining transaction data, A/B testing of websites and selling platforms, engaging potential customers over various needs, and building on small ideas in the Strategy & Execution segment.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Thinking Road can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Thinking Road has spent a significant amount of money and effort to integrate analytics and machine learning into its operations in the sector. This continuous investment in analytics has enabled, as illustrated in the Harvard case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit - to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Thinking Road to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Thinking Road to conduct training and development for its employees across the world. This will result in not only reducing the cost of training but also help employees in different part of the world to integrate with the headquarter work culture, ethos, and standards.
Use of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies for transactions
– The popularity of Bitcoin and other crypto currencies as asset class and medium of transaction has opened new opportunities for Thinking Road in the consumer business. Now Thinking Road can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Threats The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit are -
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Thinking Road can face downward pressure on margins from increasing competition from international players. The international players have stable revenue in their home market and can use those resources to penetrate prominent markets illustrated in HBR case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit .
Increasing wage structure of Thinking Road
– Post Covid-19 there is a sharp increase in the wages especially in the jobs that require interaction with people. The increasing wages can put downward pressure on the margins of Thinking Road.
Regulatory challenges
– Thinking Road needs to prepare for regulatory challenges as consumer protection groups and other pressure groups are vigorously advocating for more regulations on big business - to reduce inequality, to create a level playing field, to product data privacy and consumer privacy, to reduce the influence of big money on democratic institutions, etc. This can lead to significant changes in the Strategy & Execution industry regulations.
Capital market disruption
– During the Covid-19, Dow Jones has touched record high. The valuations of a number of companies are way beyond their existing business model potential. This can lead to capital market correction which can put a number of suppliers, collaborators, value chain partners in great financial difficulty. It will directly impact the business of Thinking Road.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Thinking Road has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Strategy & Execution industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Thinking Road needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Strategy & Execution sector. According to Mckinsey study top managers believe that the adoption of technology in operations, communications is 20-25 times faster than what they planned in the beginning of 2019.
High level of anxiety and lack of motivation
– the Great Resignation in United States is the sign of broader dissatisfaction among the workforce in United States. Thinking Road needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Strategy & Execution industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry in the industry are lowering. It can presents Thinking Road with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Thinking Road is facing in Strategy & Execution sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
New competition
– After the dotcom bust of 2001, financial crisis of 2008-09, the business formation in US economy had declined. But in 2020 alone, there are more than 1.5 million new business applications in United States. This can lead to greater competition for Thinking Road in the Strategy & Execution sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– Thinking Road can face lack of demand in the market place because of Fed actions to reduce inflation. This can lead to sluggish growth in the economy, lower demands, lower investments, higher borrowing costs, and consolidation in the field.
Backlash against dominant players
– US Congress and other legislative arms of the government are getting tough on big business especially technology companies. The digital arm of Thinking Road business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Technology disruption because of hacks, piracy etc
– The colonial pipeline illustrated, how vulnerable modern organization are to international hackers, miscreants, and disruptors. The cyber security interruption, data leaks, etc can seriously jeopardize the future growth of the organization.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, as highlighted in case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit, Thinking Road may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Strategy & Execution .
Weighted SWOT Analysis of The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit Template, Example
Not all factors mentioned under the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants in the SWOT Analysis are equal. Managers in the HBR case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit needs to zero down on the relative importance of each factor mentioned in the Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats quadrants.
We can provide the relative importance to each factor by assigning relative weights. Weighted SWOT analysis process is a three stage process –
First stage for doing weighted SWOT analysis of the case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit is to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the organization. This will help you to assess the most important strengths and weaknesses of the firm and which one of the strengths and weaknesses mentioned in the initial lists are marginal and can be left out.
Second stage for conducting weighted SWOT analysis of the Harvard case study The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit is to give probabilities to the external strategic factors thus better understanding the opportunities and threats arising out of macro environment changes and developments.
Third stage of constructing weighted SWOT analysis of The Second Road of Thought: How Design Offers Strategy a New Toolkit is to provide strategic recommendations includes – joining likelihood of external strategic factors such as opportunities and threats to the internal strategic factors – strengths and weaknesses. You should start with external factors as they will provide the direction of the overall industry. Secondly by joining probabilities with internal strategic factors can help the company not only strategic fit but also the most probably strategic trade-off that Thinking Road needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.