Swot Analysis of "Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner" written by Bhaskar Chakravorti, Shirley M. Spence includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Journey Alum facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, Leadership and Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner casestudy better are - – there is backlash against globalization, supply chains are disrupted by pandemic , competitive advantages are harder to sustain because of technology dispersion, increasing energy prices, increasing inequality as vast percentage of new income is going to the top 1%, digital marketing is dominated by two big players Facebook and Google, geopolitical disruptions,
increasing commodity prices, technology disruption, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Journey Alum, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Journey Alum 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Journey Alum
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Innovation & Entrepreneurship field.
4. Making a Innovation & Entrepreneurship topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Journey Alum
Strengths Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Journey Alum in Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner Harvard Business Review case study are -
Organizational Resilience of Journey Alum
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing that Journey Alum does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Sustainable margins compare to other players in Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry
– Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner firm has clearly differentiated products in the market place. This has enabled Journey Alum to fetch slight price premium compare to the competitors in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry. The sustainable margins have also helped Journey Alum to invest into research and development (R&D) and innovation.
Cross disciplinary teams
– Horizontal connected teams at the Journey Alum 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.
Successful track record of launching new products
– Journey Alum has launched numerous new products in last few years, keeping in mind evolving customer preferences and competitive pressures. Journey Alum 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.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Journey Alum 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Diverse revenue streams
– Journey Alum is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided firm in Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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.
Training and development
– Journey Alum has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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.
Innovation driven organization
– Journey Alum is one of the most innovative firm in sector. Manager in Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner Harvard Business Review case study can use Clayton Christensen Disruptive Innovation strategies to further increase the scale of innovtions in the organization.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy in the Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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.
Ability to lead change in Innovation & Entrepreneurship field
– Journey Alum 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 Journey Alum in – penetrating new markets, reaching out to new customers, and providing different value propositions to different customers in the international markets.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Journey Alum in the sector have low bargaining power. Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Journey Alum to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Analytics focus
– Journey Alum 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 Bhaskar Chakravorti, Shirley M. Spence 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.
Weaknesses Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner are -
Increasing silos among functional specialists
– The organizational structure of Journey Alum is dominated by functional specialists. It is not different from other players in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship segment. Journey Alum needs to de-silo the office environment to harness the true potential of its workforce. Secondly the de-silo will also help Journey Alum to focus more on services rather than just following the product oriented approach.
No frontier risks strategy
– After analyzing the HBR case study Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner, it seems that company is thinking about the frontier risks that can impact Innovation & Entrepreneurship 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.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee as mentioned in the HBR case study Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner, is just above the industry average. Journey Alum 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.
Workers concerns about automation
– As automation is fast increasing in the segment, Journey Alum 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.
Need for greater diversity
– Journey Alum 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.
Products dominated business model
– Even though Journey Alum has some of the most successful products in the industry, this business model has made each new product launch extremely critical for continuous financial growth of the organization. firm in the HBR case study - Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner HBR case study mentions - Journey Alum takes time to assess the upcoming competitions. This has led to missing out on atleast 2-3 big opportunities in the industry in last five years.
Aligning sales with marketing
– It come across in the case study Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner that the firm needs to have more collaboration between its sales team and marketing team. Sales professionals in the industry have deep experience in developing customer relationships. Marketing department in the case Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Journey Alum is planning to shift buying processes online.
Slow decision making process
– As mentioned earlier in the report, Journey Alum 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. Journey Alum 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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 Journey Alum 's lucrative customers.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Journey Alum 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.
Opportunities Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner | 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner are -
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Journey Alum 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, Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner, to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
Buying journey improvements
– Journey Alum can improve the customer journey of consumers in the industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Journey Alum is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Journey Alum 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.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Journey Alum 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.
Using analytics as competitive advantage
– Journey Alum 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner - to build a competitive advantage using analytics. The analytics driven competitive advantage can help Journey Alum to build faster Go To Market strategies, better consumer insights, developing relevant product features, and building a highly efficient supply chain.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Journey Alum 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 Innovation & Entrepreneurship segment.
Low interest rates
– Even though inflation is raising its head in most developed economies, Journey Alum can still utilize the low interest rates to borrow money for capital investment. Secondly it can also use the increase of government spending in infrastructure projects to get new business.
Loyalty marketing
– Journey Alum 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.
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Journey Alum has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in the industry. This can help Journey Alum to build a more holistic ecosystem as suggested in the Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner case study. Journey Alum can build new products and services such as - data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Lowering marketing communication costs
– 5G expansion will open new opportunities for Journey Alum in the field of marketing communication. It will bring down the cost of doing business, provide technology platform to build new products in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship segment, and it will provide faster access to the consumers.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– Consumer behavior has changed in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Journey Alum 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. Journey Alum 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.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Journey Alum can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Journey Alum operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Innovation & Entrepreneurship sector.
Threats Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner are -
Instability in the European markets
– European Union markets are facing three big challenges post Covid – expanded balance sheets, Brexit related business disruption, and aggressive Russia looking to distract the existing security mechanism. Journey Alum will face different problems in different parts of Europe. For example it will face inflationary pressures in UK, France, and Germany, balance sheet expansion and demand challenges in Southern European countries, and geopolitical instability in the Eastern Europe.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry in the industry are lowering. It can presents Journey Alum with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Journey Alum has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Journey Alum needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship 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.
Learning curve for new practices
– As the technology based on artificial intelligence and machine learning platform is getting complex, as highlighted in case study Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner, Journey Alum may face longer learning curve for training and development of existing employees. This can open space for more nimble competitors in the field of Innovation & Entrepreneurship .
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Journey Alum high dependence on third party suppliers can disrupt its processes and delivery mechanism. For example -the current troubles of car makers because of chip shortage is because the chip companies started producing chips for electronic companies rather than car manufacturers.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Journey Alum 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner .
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 Journey Alum business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Environmental challenges
– Journey Alum 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. Journey Alum can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry.
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 Journey Alum in the Innovation & Entrepreneurship sector and impact the bottomline of the organization.
Shortening product life cycle
– it is one of the major threat that Journey Alum is facing in Innovation & Entrepreneurship sector. It can lead to higher research and development costs, higher marketing expenses, lower customer loyalty, etc.
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.
Regulatory challenges
– Journey Alum 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 Innovation & Entrepreneurship industry regulations.
Increasing wage structure of Journey Alum
– 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 Journey Alum.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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 Life Journey Profile: Nicole Gardner 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 Journey Alum needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.