How to Coach Yourself and Others Essential Knowledge For Coaching | Page 541
interestingly can then provide useful points back into the economic
aspects of the PEST analysis.
Swot analysis history - the origins of the SWOT analysis model
This remarkable piece of history as to the origins of SWOT analysis was
provided by Albert S Humphrey, one of the founding fathers of what we
know today as SWOT analysis. I am indebted to him for sharing this
fascinating contribution. Albert Humphrey died on 31 October 2005. He
was one of the good guys.
SWOT analysis came from the research conducted at Stanford Research
Institute from 1960-1970. The background to SWOT stemmed from the
need to find out why corporate planning failed. The research was
funded by the fortune 500 companies to find out what could be done
about this failure. The Research Team were Marion Dosher, Dr Otis
Benepe, Albert Humphrey, Robert Stewart, Birger Lie.
It all began with the corporate planning trend, which seemed to appear
first at Du Pont in 1949. By 1960 every Fortune 500 company had a
'corporate planning manager' (or equivalent) and 'associations of long
range corporate planners' had sprung up in both the USA and the UK.
However a unanimous opinion developed in all of these companies that
corporate planning in the shape of long range planning was not
working, did not pay off, and was an expensive investment in futility.
It was widely held that managing change and setting realistic objectives
which carry the conviction of those responsible was difficult and often
resulted in questionable compromises.
The fact remained, despite the corporate and long range planners, that
the one and only missing link was how to get the management team
agreed and committed to a comprehensive set of action programmes.
To create this link, starting in 1960, Robert F Stewart at SRI in Menlo
Park California lead a research team to discover what was going wrong
with corporate planning, and then to find some sort of solution, or to
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