BUS501 Real-World Connections: Episode 5, Four Boxes on the Whiteboard

About 2 minutes. Captions are available with the CC button. Open on YouTube.

Transcript

Narrator: Real-World Connections. Episode 5: Four Boxes on the Whiteboard

Narrator: Monday morning in Toronto. The supermarket contract is still shaky, and Adaeze wants the whole leadership team in one room.

Narrator: Priya has drawn four boxes on the whiteboard.

Priya: Strengths and weaknesses go on top. Those are inside us. Opportunities and threats go below. Those are outside, and we can't control them.

Tomás: Easy. Strength: our wholesale plant. Opportunity: open more cafés.

Priya: Opening cafés is a move we'd make, not an opportunity. What's out there that would make that move worth it?

Tomás: Okay. Neighborhoods that want a local bakery.

Daniel: Weakness: the plant's running old ovens. I'll say it before somebody else does.

Hana: Good. That's the self-critical part. And let's get Kofi's café staff to fill in their own boxes. They'll see things we can't.

Adaeze: Threat: one big buyer takes a lot of our wholesale volume. If that contract goes, we feel it.

Tomás: Is that a threat or a weakness?

Priya: Both, in different boxes. The buyer's leverage is outside us. How much we lean on one customer is inside. Keep them separate or the matching gets muddy.

Adaeze: So the board's full. Do we pick our strategy now?

Priya: Not yet. SWOT is for brainstorming. It's where we start, not where we finish. Next we pair the boxes. Strengths with opportunities, weaknesses with threats.

Narrator: Four boxes and a lot of ideas, but a full board still isn't a plan.

Narrator: If you were in that room, which strength would you pair with which opportunity or threat, and what strategy would that pairing suggest?

Pause and apply

Using the Hearth & Harbor whiteboard, make a TOWS grid and write one strategy in each cell: SO, ST, WO and WT. Label which strength, weakness, opportunity or threat each strategy draws on, and check that you haven't listed a strategic move as an opportunity.

License: CC0 1.0 Universal (public domain dedication), except the Lucide icons (ISC License) and the background music (Motivating Mornings, Mixkit (Mixkit Stock Music Free License)), which aren't covered. https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/