Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
Strategy & Execution
Strategy / MBA Resources
Case Study SWOT Analysis Solution
Case Study Description of Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work
This note identifies the importance of employee/moral voice in organizational functioning. Yet despite the many benefits of employee/moral voice for effective organizational functioning, the process of speaking up about ethical matters can be difficult for both employees and their managers.
Swot Analysis of "Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work" written by Jared Harris, Megan F. Hess includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Moral Voice facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, Leadership and Strategy & Execution.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work casestudy better are - – there is backlash against globalization, increasing household debt because of falling income levels, banking and financial system is disrupted by Bitcoin and other crypto currencies, challanges to central banks by blockchain based private currencies, geopolitical disruptions, increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings,
increasing commodity prices, wage bills are increasing, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Moral Voice, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Moral Voice 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Moral Voice
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 Moral Voice
Strengths Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Moral Voice in Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work Harvard Business Review case study are -
Strong track record of project management
– Moral Voice is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Moral Voice 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy in the Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work Harvard Business Review case study comprises – understanding the underlying the factors in the industry, building diversified operations across different geographies so that disruption in one part of the world doesn’t impact the overall performance of the firm, and integrating the various business operations and processes through its digital transformation drive.
Innovation driven organization
– Moral Voice is one of the most innovative firm in sector. Manager in Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work Harvard Business Review case study can use Clayton Christensen Disruptive Innovation strategies to further increase the scale of innovtions in the organization.
High brand equity
– Moral Voice has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Moral Voice to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Moral Voice in the sector have low bargaining power. Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Moral Voice to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Moral Voice 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Superior customer experience
– The customer experience strategy of Moral Voice in the segment is based on four key concepts – personalization, simplification of complex needs, prompt response, and continuous engagement.
Successful track record of launching new products
– Moral Voice has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Moral Voice has effective processes in place that helps in exploring new product needs, doing quick pilot testing, and then launching the products quickly using its extensive distribution network.
Training and development
– Moral Voice has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work 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.
Learning organization
- Moral Voice 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 Moral Voice is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders in Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work Harvard Business Review case study emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Ability to lead change in Strategy & Execution field
– Moral Voice is one of the leading players in its industry. Over the years it has not only transformed the business landscape in its segment but also across the whole industry. The ability to lead change has enabled Moral Voice in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Weaknesses Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work are -
Skills based hiring
– The stress on hiring functional specialists at Moral Voice 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.
High bargaining power of channel partners
– Because of the regulatory requirements, Jared Harris, Megan F. Hess suggests that, Moral Voice 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.
Low market penetration in new markets
– Outside its home market of Moral Voice, firm in the HBR case study Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work needs to spend more promotional, marketing, and advertising efforts to penetrate international markets.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Moral Voice has borrowed money from the capital market at higher rates. It needs to restructure the interest payment and costs so that it can compete better and improve profitability.
Employees’ incomplete understanding of strategy
– From the instances in the HBR case study Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work, it seems that the employees of Moral Voice 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.
High dependence on star products
– The top 2 products and services of the firm as mentioned in the Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work 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 Moral Voice has relatively successful track record of launching new products.
Need for greater diversity
– Moral Voice has taken concrete steps on diversity, equity, and inclusion. But the efforts so far has resulted in limited success. It needs to expand the recruitment and selection process to hire more people from the minorities and underprivileged background.
Capital Spending Reduction
– Even during the low interest decade, Moral Voice 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.
No frontier risks strategy
– After analyzing the HBR case study Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work, 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.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Moral Voice has a very deliberative decision making approach. This approach has resulted in prudent decisions, but it has also resulted in missing opportunities in the industry over the last five years. Moral Voice even though has strong showing on digital transformation primary two stages, it has struggled to capitalize the power of digital transformation in marketing efforts and new venture efforts.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, firm in the HBR case study Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work has high operating costs in the. This can be harder to sustain given the new emerging competition from nimble players who are using technology to attract Moral Voice 's lucrative customers.
Opportunities Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work | 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work are -
Loyalty marketing
– Moral Voice has focused on building a highly responsive customer relationship management platform. This platform is built on in-house data and driven by analytics and artificial intelligence. The customer analytics can help the organization to fine tune its loyalty marketing efforts, increase the wallet share of the organization, reduce wastage on mainstream advertising spending, build better pricing strategies using personalization, etc.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Moral Voice 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work - to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Moral Voice to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Buying journey improvements
– Moral Voice can improve the customer journey of consumers in the industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work suggest that firm can provide automated chats to help consumers solve their own problems, provide online suggestions to get maximum out of the products and services, and help consumers to build a community where they can interact with each other to develop new features and uses.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Moral Voice 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 Moral Voice to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Reforming the budgeting process
- By establishing new metrics that will be used to evaluate both existing and potential projects Moral Voice can not only reduce the costs of the project but also help it in integrating the projects with other processes within the organization.
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 Moral Voice in the consumer business. Now Moral Voice can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Moral Voice 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.
Reconfiguring business model
– The expansion of digital payment system, the bringing down of international transactions costs using Bitcoin and other blockchain based currencies, etc can help Moral Voice to reconfigure its entire business model. For example it can used blockchain based technologies to reduce piracy of its products in the big markets such as China. Secondly it can use the popularity of e-commerce in various developing markets to build a Direct to Customer business model rather than the current Channel Heavy distribution network.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Moral Voice 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.
Developing new processes and practices
– Moral Voice 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 Moral Voice has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in the industry. This can help Moral Voice to build a more holistic ecosystem as suggested in the Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work case study. Moral Voice can build new products and services such as - data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, 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. Moral Voice can tie-up with other value chain partners to explore new opportunities regarding meeting customer demands and building a rewarding and engaging relationship.
Identify volunteer opportunities
– Covid-19 has impacted working population in two ways – it has led to people soul searching about their professional choices, resulting in mass resignation. Secondly it has encouraged people to do things that they are passionate about. This has opened opportunities for businesses to build volunteer oriented socially driven projects. Moral Voice can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Threats Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work are -
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Moral Voice has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Strategy & Execution industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Moral Voice 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.
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 Moral Voice in the Strategy & Execution sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work, Moral Voice 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 .
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– Moral Voice 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.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry in the industry are lowering. It can presents Moral Voice with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Aging population
– As the populations of most advanced economies are aging, it will lead to high social security costs, higher savings among population, and lower demand for goods and services in the economy. The household savings in US, France, UK, Germany, and Japan are growing faster than predicted because of uncertainty caused by pandemic.
Environmental challenges
– Moral Voice needs to have a robust strategy against the disruptions arising from climate change and energy requirements. EU has identified it as key priority area and spending 30% of its 880 billion Euros European post Covid-19 recovery funds on green technology. Moral Voice can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Strategy & Execution industry.
Regulatory challenges
– Moral Voice 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.
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. Moral Voice needs to understand the core reasons impacting the Strategy & Execution industry. This will help it in building a better workplace.
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 Moral Voice.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Moral Voice in the Strategy & Execution industry. The Strategy & Execution industry is already at various protected from local competition in China, with the rise of trade war the protection levels may go up. This presents a clear threat of current business model in Chinese market.
Easy access to finance
– Easy access to finance in Strategy & Execution field will also reduce the barriers to entry in the industry, thus putting downward pressure on the prices because of increasing competition. Moral Voice can utilize it by borrowing at lower rates and invest it into research and development, capital expenditure to fortify its core competitive advantage.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work 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 Moral Voice: Talking About Ethics at Work 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 Moral Voice needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.