Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
Leadership & Managing People
Strategy / MBA Resources
Case Study SWOT Analysis Solution
Case Study Description of Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking
Whether we admit it or not, common, everyday biases influence how we see the world. The fact is, we cannot go shopping, enter a conversation, or make a decision without a bias of some sort kicking in. The authors show that the best way to overcome common biases in the workplace is collectively. They describe five classes of common biases that all leaders should be familiar with, and show how team-based practices can be redesigned to help identify biases as they emerge, and counteract them on the fly.
Swot Analysis of "Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking" written by Heidi Grant Halvorson, David Rock includes – strengths weakness that are internal strategic factors of the organization, and opportunities and threats that Biases Bias facing as an external strategic factors. Some of the topics covered in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking case study are - Strategic Management Strategies, Leadership, Organizational culture and Leadership & Managing People.
Some of the macro environment factors that can be used to understand the Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking casestudy better are - – talent flight as more people leaving formal jobs, wage bills are increasing, technology disruption, increasing government debt because of Covid-19 spendings, geopolitical disruptions, there is backlash against globalization, cloud computing is disrupting traditional business models,
there is increasing trade war between United States & China, customer relationship management is fast transforming because of increasing concerns over data privacy, etc
Introduction to SWOT Analysis of Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking
SWOT stands for an organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats . At Oak Spring University , we believe that protagonist in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking case study can use SWOT analysis as a strategic management tool to assess the current internal strengths and weaknesses of the Biases Bias, and to figure out the opportunities and threats in the macro environment – technological, environmental, political, economic, social, demographic, etc in which Biases Bias 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking can be done for the following purposes –
1. Strategic planning using facts provided in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking case study
2. Improving business portfolio management of Biases Bias
3. Assessing feasibility of the new initiative in Leadership & Managing People field.
4. Making a Leadership & Managing People topic specific business decision
5. Set goals for the organization
6. Organizational restructuring of Biases Bias
Strengths Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Strengths in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The strengths of Biases Bias in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking Harvard Business Review case study are -
High brand equity
– Biases Bias has strong brand awareness and brand recognition among both - the exiting customers and potential new customers. Strong brand equity has enabled Biases Bias to keep acquiring new customers and building profitable relationship with both the new and loyal customers.
Operational resilience
– The operational resilience strategy in the Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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
– Biases Bias is one of the most innovative firm in sector. Manager in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking Harvard Business Review case study can use Clayton Christensen Disruptive Innovation strategies to further increase the scale of innovtions in the organization.
Diverse revenue streams
– Biases Bias is present in almost all the verticals within the industry. This has provided firm in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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.
Low bargaining power of suppliers
– Suppliers of Biases Bias in the sector have low bargaining power. Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking has further diversified its suppliers portfolio by building a robust supply chain across various countries. This helps Biases Bias to manage not only supply disruptions but also source products at highly competitive prices.
Effective Research and Development (R&D)
– Biases Bias 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking - staying ahead in the industry in terms of – new product launches, superior customer experience, highly competitive pricing strategies, and great returns to the shareholders.
Highly skilled collaborators
– Biases Bias 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking HBR case study have helped the firm to develop new products and bring them quickly to the marketplace.
Learning organization
- Biases Bias 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 Biases Bias is open place that encourages instructiveness, ideation, open minded discussions, and creativity. Employees and leaders in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking Harvard Business Review case study emphasize – knowledge, initiative, and innovation.
Strong track record of project management
– Biases Bias is known for sticking to its project targets. This enables the firm to manage – time, project costs, and have sustainable margins on the projects.
High switching costs
– The high switching costs that Biases Bias has built up over years in its products and services combo offer has resulted in high retention of customers, lower marketing costs, and greater ability of the firm to focus on its customers.
Organizational Resilience of Biases Bias
– The covid-19 pandemic has put organizational resilience at the centre of everthing that Biases Bias does. Organizational resilience comprises - Financial Resilience, Operational Resilience, Technological Resilience, Organizational Resilience, Business Model Resilience, and Reputation Resilience.
Training and development
– Biases Bias has one of the best training and development program in the industry. The effectiveness of the training programs can be measured in Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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.
Weaknesses Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking | Internal Strategic Factors
What are Weaknesses in SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The weaknesses of Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking are -
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 Biases Bias supply chain. Even after few cautionary changes mentioned in the HBR case study - Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking, it is still heavily dependent upon the existing supply chain. The existing supply chain though brings in cost efficiencies but it has left Biases Bias vulnerable to further global disruptions in South East Asia.
Aligning sales with marketing
– It come across in the case study Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking can leverage the sales team experience to cultivate customer relationships as Biases Bias is planning to shift buying processes online.
Need for greater diversity
– Biases Bias 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 Biases Bias 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 - Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking should strive to include more intangible value offerings along with its core products and services.
High operating costs
– Compare to the competitors, firm in the HBR case study Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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 Biases Bias 's lucrative customers.
Ability to respond to the competition
– As the decision making is very deliberative, highlighted in the case study Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking, in the dynamic environment Biases Bias has struggled to respond to the nimble upstart competition. Biases Bias has reasonably good record with similar level competitors but it has struggled with new entrants taking away niches of its business.
Slow to strategic competitive environment developments
– As Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking HBR case study mentions - Biases Bias 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.
Compensation and incentives
– The revenue per employee as mentioned in the HBR case study Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking, is just above the industry average. Biases Bias 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.
Interest costs
– Compare to the competition, Biases Bias 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking, it seems that the employees of Biases Bias 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.
Lack of clear differentiation of Biases Bias products
– To increase the profitability and margins on the products, Biases Bias needs to provide more differentiated products than what it is currently offering in the marketplace.
Opportunities Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking | 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking are -
Creating value in data economy
– The success of analytics program of Biases Bias has opened avenues for new revenue streams for the organization in the industry. This can help Biases Bias to build a more holistic ecosystem as suggested in the Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking case study. Biases Bias can build new products and services such as - data insight services, data privacy related products, data based consulting services, etc.
Buying journey improvements
– Biases Bias can improve the customer journey of consumers in the industry by using analytics and artificial intelligence. Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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.
Increase in government spending
– As the United States and other governments are increasing social spending and infrastructure spending to build economies post Covid-19, Biases Bias can use these opportunities to build new business models that can help the communities that Biases Bias operates in. Secondly it can use opportunities from government spending in Leadership & Managing People sector.
Changes in consumer behavior post Covid-19
– Consumer behavior has changed in the Leadership & Managing People industry because of Covid-19 restrictions. Some of this behavior will stay once things get back to normal. Biases Bias 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. Biases Bias 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.
Remote work and new talent hiring opportunities
– The widespread usage of remote working technologies during Covid-19 has opened opportunities for Biases Bias 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 Biases Bias to hire the very best people irrespective of their geographical location.
Learning at scale
– Online learning technologies has now opened space for Biases Bias 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.
Building a culture of innovation
– managers at Biases Bias 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 Leadership & Managing People segment.
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. Biases Bias can explore opportunities that can attract volunteers and are consistent with its mission and vision.
Loyalty marketing
– Biases Bias 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.
Leveraging digital technologies
– Biases Bias 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.
Redefining models of collaboration and team work
– As explained in the weaknesses section, Biases Bias is facing challenges because of the dominance of functional experts in the organization. Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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.
Harnessing reconfiguration of the global supply chains
– As the trade war between US and China heats up in the coming years, Biases Bias 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, Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking, to buy more products closer to the markets, and it can leverage its size and influence to get better deal from the local markets.
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 Biases Bias in the consumer business. Now Biases Bias can target international markets with far fewer capital restrictions requirements than the existing system.
Threats Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking External Strategic Factors
What are Threats in the SWOT Analysis / TOWS Matrix / Weighted SWOT Analysis
The threats mentioned in the HBR case study Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking are -
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 Biases Bias.
Increasing international competition and downward pressure on margins
– Apart from technology driven competitive advantage dilution, Biases Bias 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking .
Stagnating economy with rate increase
– Biases Bias 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.
Regulatory challenges
– Biases Bias 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 Leadership & Managing People industry regulations.
High dependence on third party suppliers
– Biases Bias 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.
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. Biases Bias 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.
Consumer confidence and its impact on Biases Bias demand
– There is a high probability of declining consumer confidence, given – high inflammation rate, rise of gig economy, lower job stability, increasing cost of living, higher interest rates, and aging demography. All the factors contribute to people saving higher rate of their income, resulting in lower consumer demand in the industry and other sectors.
Technology acceleration in Forth Industrial Revolution
– Biases Bias has witnessed rapid integration of technology during Covid-19 in the Leadership & Managing People industry. As one of the leading players in the industry, Biases Bias needs to keep up with the evolution of technology in the Leadership & Managing People 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.
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 Biases Bias business can come under increasing regulations regarding data privacy, data security, etc.
Trade war between China and United States
– The trade war between two of the biggest economies can hugely impact the opportunities for Biases Bias in the Leadership & Managing People industry. The Leadership & Managing People 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.
Barriers of entry lowering
– As technology is more democratized, the barriers to entry in the industry are lowering. It can presents Biases Bias with greater competitive threats in the near to medium future. Secondly it will also put downward pressure on pricing throughout the sector.
Increasing wage structure of Biases Bias
– 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 Biases Bias.
Environmental challenges
– Biases Bias 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. Biases Bias can take advantage of this fund but it will also bring new competitors in the Leadership & Managing People industry.
Weighted SWOT Analysis of Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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 Beyond Bias: How to Shift Ingrained Thinking 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 Biases Bias needs to make to build a sustainable competitive advantage.
