Guide to Management Ideas- A Series of Interesting Selection of How Business Works.



GA Business and Management Consultancy
The Real Best in Asia

 Our series of management ideas continues as we focus on  issues : "SWOT ANALYSIS" and "THE GLASS CEILING".

SWOT ANALYSIS
SWOT stands for Strength , Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. How can an organization manage SWOT in a way that will optimize its performance? A second four letter acronym is sometimes brought into play here: USED. How can be the strengths be Used; the weaknesses be Stopped, the opportunities be Exploited; and the threats be Defended against?

The process starts by listing a firm's attributes under the four headings. These are then given scores according to what is seen as likely to be the company's business environment over the next few years.

The four features can be divided along two main dimensions:
- Internal/ external . The internal features are the company's own strengths and weaknesses. Analyzing them is a matter of analyzing the state of the company. They are things that already exist. The external features are the organization's opportunities and the threats to its future performance. These exist only on the horizon , and they are less easy to assess and measure; and
- Positive/negative. The positive things are the strengths and opportunities; the negative ones are the threats and weaknesses.

A SWOT analysis can be applied to different aspects of a company's business. The simplicity and intuitive wholeness of the framework have helped to make it extremely popular with the corporations and governments.

There are, of course, critics. One of the main criticisms is that, in the end , such an analysis invariably relies on subjective judgments. Objective measures of all the ingredients in the balance simply do not exist. Some say that this does not matter, because the process of doing the analysis is more important and revealing than the results of the analysis themselves. The journey is more important than the destination.

THE GLASS CEILING
The expression " the glass ceiling" looks at the persistent failure of women to climb as far up the corporate ladder as might be expected from their representation in the working population as a whole. The idea behind the expression was that a transparent barrier, a glass ceiling , blocked them. Invisible from the bottom, when women started their careers , it was steely strong in stopping them attaining equality with men later on.

A second issue is that of woman's pay. There is evidence that even when women do reach the highest levels of corporate management , they do not receive the same pay as men for the same job. And rather than getting better over time, the position seems to be deteriorating.

The US Glass Ceiling Commission focused on barriers in three areas:
- The filling of management and decision-making positions;
- Skills-enhancing activities; and
- Compensation and reward systems.

Needless to say, the problem did not disappear. Several theories have been presented to explain the glass ceiling:
 - The Time Factor: First class female graduates have not yet had time to work through the pipeline and reach the top of corporate hierarchy. Qualifications for a senior management post usually include a graduate degree and 25 years of continuous work experience.
- Motherhood. Women are said to be distracted from their career path by the need to stay at home and rear children.
- Lack of role models. Because women are so often a token female in their work environment they stand out from the rest. This makes them (and their failures) much more visible, and exaggerates the difference between them and the dominant male culture.