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Category Archives: strategic decision making

Coming Up for Air in 2014

Posted on February 9, 2014 | Leave a comment

It is time to come up for air after having put my blog on sabbatical the last two years. A sabbatical wasn’t really planned…it started out as a case of blogstipation which was followed by the all-consuming task of launching a new company RealWeld Systems, Inc.

Fast forward to today and I’m excited to join the board of Sitrion as the company executes on its multi-ecosystem strategy. For over a decade while I was at Open Text, the company evolved from being entirely independent with no integration or major partnerships to having compelling integration and partnerships with SAP, Microsoft, and Oracle. During that time, our sales and product evolved from the paraphrased positioning “we are the greatest” to “we are the greatest working with systems you’ve already bought”.

Creating win-win scenarios for the customer and partner, decision trade-offs on depth versus quantity of integration, and properly positioning added-value for all parties in a language familiar to the customer are just some of the strategic multi-ecosystem issues worth wrestling about.

In 2014, I will spend most of my time continuing to grow RealWeld, which has the opportunity to revolutionize manual welding training, credentialing, and quality assurance. In addition to Sitrion, I’ll also spend board member time for Seen Digital Media, Inc who provides an application for visual marketing campaigns for leading brands. Every time I’m in a deep discussion about one of these companies, I find myself writing an “ah-ha” reminder or action for one of the others. Being a startup operator, I can relate better to Daniel and Brian as the CEO’s of Sitrion and Seen respectively. And being a board member makes me a better operator of RealWeld. It’s an awesome cycle of filtering on the best business ideas, practices, and people from a diverse set of companies. It has already been a fun year!

SWOT and SWAT

Posted on November 7, 2010 | Leave a comment

I had an amusing encounter recently while working on strategy planning for two different clients (yes, I am easily amused). One client was focused on their SWOT. The other was focused on SWAT.

A SWOT is a common planning framework – a 2×2 grid that identifies Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Its a popular framework because its easy to understand. But at the same time, it on its own usually doesn’t produce useful insights. I follow a LinkedIn discussion group on strategy planning and there was a recent vigorous debate on the merits of SWOT as a planning tool. The conclusion in this thread, like many things, is that a SWOT exercise can be a valuable and worthwhile exercise, but is not a panacea for strategy planning.

A SWAT strategy is something different. SWAT stands for “Sell Whats Available Today”. All to often, we get excited about selling that next great thing and forget that we’ve already got lots of great things to sell. Its an interesting exercise to do growth planning using the constraint of no new innovations or product development. That constraint forces your growth strategy to focus on the market, customers, pricing, and competition. Suddenly your debating target segments, value propositions, under-served markets, new pricing models, geographical expansion, competitive positioning, etc.

So both SWOT and SWAT are interesting strategic framework tools. I’m guessing most organizations have spent too much energy on their SWOT and not enough energy on a SWAT.